KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Corey McCue has seen the worst of the fight for Kandahar, and the best. A 25-year-old combat engineer based in Petawawa, Ont., he is completing his second combat tour in three years. By the time he comes home in July, he will have served almost 600 days in theatre, more than half of them “outside the wire,” living rough and traveling hard. He has experienced two different wars.

Canada’s combat mission in the Afghan province ends formally in ten days. Canadian troops have lately been winning small but important victories, taking far fewer casualties than before, opening new rural roads and schools, and feeling confidant they are making improvements and accomplishing their tasks. But Cpl. McCue remembers another, bloodier conflict. A war that was being lost.

He first laid eyes on this battle-scarred province in September 2008 as a member of Operation Athena, Roto-6. At the time, it was obvious to rank and file soldiers and officers alike that Canada’s military and civilian objectives – to free Kandahar from Taliban violence and threats, to establish capable, local security forces and governance, and to rebuild the province’s crumbling infrastructure -were falling short. From what he could see, “everything was falling apart,” Cpl. McCue recalls.

This was not an isolated opinion. Morale among troops had plummeted. “My men don’t want to come back [for another tour],” one grizzled captain told me several months before Cpl. McCue and his battle group arrived. We were standing inside a remote Canadian-held forward operating base west of Kandahar city. The captain was exceptionally candid. He had already claimed that some of his men were being blamed, unfairly, for handling a detainee improperly. Now he was charging they were all “scared.”

“It’s fucking dangerous out here,” said the captain. Standing beside us was a full colonel. The colonel showed no surprise. He expressed no chagrin. It wasn’t news to him.

Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan was then in its seventh year. The first Canadian troops –elite special forces members — deployed quietly in December 2001, three months after Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network had launched its devastating attacks on the United States. The Canadians conducted clandestine operations aimed at capturing or killing al-Qaeda fighters and their Afghan brethren, members of the Taliban. Regular infantry soldiers were sent forward in 2002, and a year later, almost 2,000 troops were deployed to Kabul, to help secure and rebuild the Afghan capital. This was the first rotation of Operation Athena, Phase I. It wasn’t a “traditional” peacekeeping effort, but to many back home, it seemed to fit Canada’s perceived role as a reliable contributor to international relief and security efforts.

The operation’s second and more controversial phase began with a battle group deployment to Kandahar, early in 2006. Canadian soldiers — most of them from 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry — were suddenly in the crucible, responsible for a multinational counterinsurgency campaign in a land of tribal complexities that none claimed to understand, in a physical setting they didn’t recognize, fighting an enemy they struggled to distinguish from peaceful men.

Their war — Canada’s war — had begun.

By the end of 2006, 36 Canadians had died on the battlefield in Kandahar. By the end of 2007, another 29 Canadian soldiers were dead, and an officer in Kabul had committed suicide. Dozens more losses would follow: Lost lives, and lost opportunities. Chaos, mistakes, denials, scrambled facts, anger. Pessimism and confusion, in Kandahar and at home.

Finally, near the end, there were better moments, real accomplishments and even hope. Canada’s efforts in Afghanistan aren’t over, but the most difficult phase has ended. Was it worth the sacrifice, the spent treasure, the pain and the burden put on soldiers and their families? And did Kandahar benefit? To find answers, we return to the scene, to a story that began long before Cpl. McCue first arrived.

Kandahar Airfield, December 2006: Momentum that Canadian troops had seized early in their combat mission was now stalled. Initial battlefield victories, most notably Operation Medusa, a spectacular September 2006 drubbing handed the Taliban by Canadian and other coalition forces in key Kandahar districts of Panjwaii and Zhari, had come undone. While an estimated 500 insurgents were killed during the two-week combat phase of the operation, compared to just five Canadian fatalities, the Taliban quickly reinforced their presence in the two districts. “The Taliban filled back in,” a Canadian officer acknowledged at a December 2006 briefing with reporters embedded at Kandahar Airfield (KAF). The officer put insurgent numbers in two key districts – Zhari and Panjwaii, west of Kandahar city -at 900, greater than Canada’s own troop strength in the two districts.

“Medusa,” he admitted, “did not achieve post-kinetic objectives.” And the Canadians had fallen back on their heels.

There weren’t enough Canadian forces or Afghan National Security Forces [ANSF] on the ground in Kandahar to beat back Taliban fighters, who streamed into the province from training centres in Pakistan. Insurgents came to Kandahar, season after season, and year after year. They considered the province their turf; this was the movement’s birthplace and spiritual home. The International Security Assistance Force, the NATO-led coalition military response to al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, had not mustered an adequate response. Military analyst Carl Forsberg summarized the situation in a report he prepared for the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based non-partisan think tank. “Despite Kandahar’s military and political importance,” he wrote, “ISAF failed to prioritize the province from 2005 to 2009, allowing much of the population to fall under the Taliban’s control or influence.”

Just before Christmas 2006, the Canadians led another large operation in Zhari and Panjwaii. The operation dubbed Baaz Tsuka, or Falcon Summit, was intended to bring material assistance to the local population and disrupt Taliban activities in the two districts. Principal targets were so-called tier-two Taliban, local men of fighting age, most of them poor and illiterate and attracted to the insurgency by the promise of money. ISAF’s plan was to hand them shovels, picks and wheelbarrows, in the hopes they would abandon the insurgency. They would also be offered positions in a new paramilitary outfit, the National Auxiliary Police, described at the time as a kind of armed neighbourhood watch.

The operation went ahead as scheduled and was over by the new year. Logistically, it was a success. Taliban forces had decided not to engage their adversaries; they remained inside walled residential compounds in the two districts as Canadian soldiers unloaded five sea containers filled with hand tools. These were distributed in the two districts. As well, about $50,000 in cash was distributed to local elders, to be used to entice the half-hearted among them to commit to the Afghan government side.

The other objective — to persuade the tier-two Taliban to put down their arms — was not achieved. Few dared abandon the Taliban, let alone leave to join the National Auxiliary Police. The program was soon abandoned. And hard-won territory in Panjwaii fell to insurgents in the new year.

By then, the Taliban’s battle space had changed. Their fighters launched fewer direct attacks and ambushes on well-equipped foreign fighters. Not because they were outmanned; they often had the numeric advantage. Canadian troops were stretched notoriously thin. Each 1,200 member battle group rotation was responsible for securing all of Kandahar, a province similar in size to Nova Scotia. This mean that prior to 2009, the Canadian Forces could spare only two infantry companies – about 180 soldiers – and a small tank squadron to patrol and secure Zhari and Panjwaii districts, where the Taliban had concentrated. Other battle group companies and elements were responsible for protecting districts to the east, to the southeast, and to the northeast, reaching well beyond Kandahar city.

But the Taliban were no match for Canadian guns and tanks, nor the 500-pound precision bombs that American aircraft were prepared to drop on them from the air. By 2007, insurgents relied mostly on quick-and-dirty surprise attacks using small arms, rocket propelled grenades, and home made bombs. In the rural countryside, where most Canadian troops operated, the Taliban found their greatest success planting deadly improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Using parts sourced from Pakistan and Iran, insurgents buried the bombs under footpaths, roadways, in mud walls and in trees. They were detonated using simple remote controlled devices, or by compression. Toor Jan, a former Taliban commander in Panjwaii, recalled that the “IEDs were fantastic. We would plant them in areas where we knew the foreign troops were coming, and when they came we would just blow them up.”

By the time Cpl. McCue deployed to Kandahar in September 2008, the combat mission had claimed 87 Canadian lives; 42 of the deaths were the result of IED blasts. Nine more Canadians would be dead by the year’s end, all of them victims of IEDs. And in the following year, 32 Canadian soldiers involved in the combat mission would die; all but three were killed by IEDs. (The figures do not include four Canadians killed by U.S. friendly fire during a training exercise near KAF in 2002, and four Canadians killed in other parts of Afghanistan between October 2003 and November 2005, prior to the start of the combat mission in Kandahar).

“I think 2008 was a big step back,” acknowledges Lt.-Col. Michel-Henri St-Louis, commander of Roto-10, the last Canadian battle group to deploy to Kandahar. Lt.-Col. St-Louis arrived in theatre last fall, under very different circumstances, but like every Canadian soldier he was acutely aware of the problems that battle groups had already encountered.

LOSING HOPE

In Kandahar city, insurgents continued to focus on “soft targets” such as Afghan civilians, government workers, elected officials and police. Security remained a distant dream, as did promised improvements to infrastructure. Electricity was sporadic across the entire province. Due to a chronic lack of power, factories sat closed. Unemployment remained high. The public’s frustration boiled. Ordinary Kandaharis – almost a million Muslim men, women and children, most of them illiterate, waging their own battles with disease, poverty, corruption and internecine tribalism – had no love for the Taliban, whom they regarded as tyrannical and cruel, but they remained suspicious of foreign troops and viewed many local government officials with contempt.

About 10,000 internally displaced peoples, or war refugees, were camped north of the fighting zone and in Kandahar city. The refugees were being ignored; international aid money meant to alleviate their conditions and their suffering was being diverted into the pockets of corrupt Afghan officials. The camps had become prime recruiting zones for insurgents.

In 2007, the Canadian Forces hired a polling firm to survey Kandaharis; one question asked was whether they felt “relatively safe” in their communities. A little more than half of respondents answered “yes.” A year later, they were asked the same question; only 25% answered in the affirmative. Brigadier-General Denis Thompson, who commanded Canadian troops in Kandahar in 2008, acknowledged to the National Post that “people’s perception of security has had its legs cut out from underneath it. And that is a result of a change in Taliban tactics. They have gone from being in your face in 2006 and earlier to doubling up the number of improvised explosive attacks and acts of intimidation, such as splashing acid in the face of schoolgirls or executing the deputy chief of police from Kandahar province.”

Violent crime remained a concern. Civilians were being targeted by kidnappers. Sometimes, police were involved in abductions. In July 2008, the Taliban blew open the gates of Sarposa Prison, an archaic penitentiary on the outskirts of Kandahar city, with a massive truck bomb. All 1,000 inmates – including an estimated 400 insurgents – escaped.

The crime wave continued; so did Taliban-led intimidation and murder. Some community leaders began to express frustration with the situation, at the lack of security and at the scarcity of resources and jobs. There were hardships and atrocities under Taliban rule, they agreed, but daily life was even more difficult under the elected national government led by President Hamid Karzai, himself a native of Kandahar. “The Taliban were bad, but they weren’t corrupt,” a Kandahar city university teacher and businessman named Aman Kamran told me in 2008. That wasn’t true; the Taliban had filled their own coffers with profits from the sale of opium, until international pressures forced them to stop poppy production in 2000.

Mr. Kamran made a lasting impression. A native of Kandahar, he had left during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and worked for years in New York. He became an American citizen. Like thousands of other Kandaharis, Mr. Kamran returned to the province after the Taliban were removed from power. He hoped to build a thriving business and something like a normal life. That didn’t happen. When we met, he had almost lost hope. “Kandaharis have two faces,” he said ominously. “We have been showing our sheep face. Don’t force us or pressure us or we will show our wolf face. Once frustrated enough, the general public will pick up arms. They will wage war on the government and coalition forces responsible for this mess.”

Kandaharis questioned the coalition’s motives and commitments. Why would rich men and women from the West put their lives on the line for some farmers in Panjwaii? And how long would they stay? Canada’s counterinsurgency objectives – winning the battle for local hearts and minds, separating insurgents from the population – were not lost, but they weren’t being won. As for defeating the Taliban, something the Canadian public thought was the goal? That had never been in the cards, admitted Brig.-Gen. Thompson, on his return from Kandahar.

“In a counter-insurgency there is no VE Day and there is no ticker tape parade,” he told the National Post. “There is none of that. It just slowly withers and dies. You don’t defeat an insurgency. You marginalize it. You bring it to the point where it is forced to become just a political movement and then they are just the opposition.”

AT THE HEART OF THE ENEMY

Cpl. McCue paid little attention to the politics of war. Like most enlisted Canadian soldiers deployed for the first time to Kandahar, his understanding of local life and customs was minimal at best. He was posted to Forward Operating Base Sperwan Ghar, as remote a place as he could have imagined. An old Soviet-made mound of dirt and sand, it sits like a giant anthill in the middle of Taliban country, about 30 kilometres west of KAF, on a triangular peninsula called the Horn of Panjwaii. About 160 square kilometres, the Horn is the movement’s traditional seat of power.

FOB Sperwan Ghar was the only significant Canadian position in the Horn when Cpl. McCue landed there in 2008. It was constantly under enemy fire. Helicopters routinely took small arms fire when they flew into Sperwan Ghar. Insurgents could creep into firing position just outside the FOB’s walls. Private contractors hired to chopper supplies to Canadian troops in the Horn would eventually refuse to land at Sperwan Ghar.

The dirt road leading into FOB Sperwan Ghar was riddled with IEDs. “My first day in theatre, we dealt with an IED in a culvert, right on the road out front,” Cpl. McCue recalls. “It happened once or twice again after that. The same culvert. There were walls on either side of the road, and the enemy could get right up to the culvert and do their thing, without anyone [in the FOB] noticing them.” The fields surrounding the FOB were also mined.

Despite the dangerous terrain, Cpl. McCue and his mates conducted regular foot patrols; these “dismounted ops,” he recalls, would last one to two weeks. Sections of about ten men walked west from FOB Sperwan Ghar towards a small village called Mushan, near the tip of the Horn where two rivers converge and the Panjwaii district ends. The patrols were meant to demonstrate their presence in the area, and they often led to searches inside suspect dwellings and compounds. Soldiers knew they were also meant to provoke the enemy. “Every time we went west of Sperwan Ghar, we’d get in a fight,” says Cpl. McCue. Always. “We knew that when we went past that [specific position] on a map, we were getting into a fight. It happened every time…We were provoking. The officer in command, he wanted that, but he wouldn’t say ‘let’s go out and pick a fight’.”

Cpl. McCue and his mates could not see the point. “There was definitely an objective for every operation we went on. But, as for the purpose and the outcome, it was almost like there was no hope. We just didn’t know what we were fighting for at the time. It felt like a lost cause. A lot of guys were getting angry, frustrated. We were clearing routes of IEDs, and finding lots. We were winning firefights and coming out with no one injured. Everything we trained for, we did, and we did it really well. But it just seemed we were doing it for no reason.”

Things would get worse. Early in 2009, Cpl. McCue was part of a group posted to a small police substation (PSS) that Canadian engineers had built in remote Mushan. “We went out there to patrol and to build a helicopter landing pad,” he recalls. PSS Mushan was one of four police substations that Canadians had assembled in the Horn over the previous winter. Meant to establish a permanent, visible presence in Taliban-dominated areas and to try and keep open the one road running the Horn’s length, each PSS was manned with Afghan National Police officers and up to eight Canadian mentors, soldiers attached to special groups called Police Operational Mentor and Liaison Teams (POMLT).

Conditions inside PSS Mushan “were pretty shitty,” says Cpl. McCue. “It was falling apart. There was mud everywhere.” The little fort was exposed and offered soldiers minimal protection. Delivering basic supplies – food, water and ammunition – to the four police substations required a massive military effort. Convoys of 70 vehicles or more had to travel dangerous roads or along the Arghandab River bed intersecting the Taliban heartland, on three-day resupply operations. I traveled on one of those journeys in early 2008; despite taking precautions, our convoy hit an IED along the way. On that occasion, no one was killed but a vehicle was destroyed.

PSS Mushan was probably the last place any Canadian soldier wanted to be. In fact, none of the four police substations – built inside villages at Mushan, Talukan, Zangabad and Hajji – were helping secure the Horn of Panjwaii and separate insurgents from the local population. There was a familiar expression in Kandahar: If you don’t stop for a policeman, he will shoot you. If you do stop, he will rob you.

The piecemeal forts were putting people in harm’s way, attracting Taliban fighters like moths to a flame. That was obviously not the intention, says Maj. Eric Landry, an armoured squadron commander from the 1er Bataillon, Royal 22ieme Regiment, based in Val-Cartier, Que. In late 2007 and early 2008, Maj. Landry, then a captain, was the Canadian Forces’ chief military planner in Kandahar, responsible for conceiving operations across the province. “The idea was to put these little pieces of infrastructure along an existing road, that at the time we called Route Foster,” recalls Maj. Landry. “We would maintain that road and put local police along it. We thought that just that presence would increase security. The assumption was that we would patrol around those substations to the point that our zone of influence in the Horn would grow bigger and bigger, and these police substations would connect, and the whole road would be open. But it didn’t work as much as we thought it would.”

The Canadian presence in the Horn was “too risky,” Brig.-Gen. Jonathan Vance acknowledged later. Brig.-Gen. Vance led all Canadian troops in the province, as commander of Task Force Kandahar from February to November, 2009, and again in 2010. “We didn’t have enough resources,” he said. The police substations were of “no use, no value. An island of [coalition troops] that had a 300-metre patrolling radius, and every time we did one of these river-run convoys we risked losses. For what? Nothing.”

All four police substations were dismantled; PSS Mushan was the last to go, in May 2009. The tear-down operations involved hundreds of Canadian and ANSF troops but they were kept quiet; reporters embedded with Canadian troops in Kandahar weren’t initially informed because the withdrawals could only have been perceived as a negative. The Canadians and Afghans who had operated from the substations were posted elsewhere and the territory around them was ceded to insurgents.

While members of the Canadian Forces refused to call the withdrawals from the Horn a defeat, there’s no question they were significant setbacks. “They had to be,” reflected Lt.-Col. St-Louis, commander of the last battle group to deploy to Kandahar. “It fed into the insurgents’ story that the government of Afghanistan, the security forces of Afghanistan, with the coalition, cannot help you, cannot deliver on the promise of security.”

But rural folk living in the Horn of Panjwaii expressed relief they were gone. “We were living in fear when the [Mushan] fort was there,” one local landowner told me in May 2009. “The Taliban would attack it, and of course the Canadians and Afghan [police] would react. Civilians suffered casualties.” With the troops gone, insurgents were “walking round freely and with rifles,” he added. The Horn was lost, for the time being.

THE SURGE

The situation was grim across most of Kandahar province. Institute of the Study of War research analyst Carl Forsberg noted that by mid-2009, “the coalition could rarely hold ground and often avoided the areas of greatest importance to the Taliban…[Taliban] Sanctuaries in Zhari, Panjwaii, and Arghandab supported bomb-making and IED factories, allowed the basing of insurgent fighters and the organization of complex attacks, and were used for shadow courts to which the Taliban would summon Kandahar City residents.”

Within the city itself, Mr. Forsberg continued, “the Taliban conducted dramatic attacks on Afghan government targets and undertook an assassination and intimidation campaign to dissuade the population of Kandahar City from supporting or assisting the Afghan government.”

But help was coming, from the United States. More U.S. troops were on their way to Kandahar Airfield, already the largest military base in Afghanistan and home to some 15,000 soldiers, private contractors, maintenance and service workers from more than a dozen nations. An American troop surge that began in summer 2009 would continue well into the next year. KAF’s population would double.

U.S. Army engineers and contractors on KAF added more housing units, more mess halls, more airfield capacity and a new, $35 million hospital, a state-of-the-art facility made of bricks and mortar that, like the rest of the new infrastructure, seemed meant to last a very long time.

For Canadian soldiers, however, time was running out. Their “military presence” in Kandahar was to have ended in 2009, but Conservative and Liberal members of the House of Commons voted to extend the mission to 2011. This was a remarkable victory for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, since the war was unpopular at home, and the mission’s purpose and objectives were not well understood. Canadian soldiers were dying at a faster rate than soldiers from other nations involved in the conflict, a discouraging fact that the public recognized and even resented. Reports circulated that insurgents captured by Canadian soldiers were routinely abused by Afghan authorities.

The public’s confusion and anger were considered by an independent government panel, chaired by former Liberal Cabinet minister John Manley. It reported to parliament in January 2008 and from that sprang a Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan.

Tasked to examine the conflict and file quarterly, public reports on the mission to conclusion, the parliamentary committee did not mince words. The mission had run into difficulties, it recognized. Moreover, Afghan society was barely advancing. A committee report filed early in 2010 was typically frank. “The Taliban insurgency gained strength and influence throughout 2008 and most of 2009,” it read. “In Afghanistan, profoundly serious issues remain. The death and destruction of the last 30 years has deeply traumatized all parts of Afghan society. Afghan institutions at every level lack capacity, transparency, and accountability.

There is a desperate shortage of teachers, doctors, nurses, and professionals of every kind. Violence and insecurity, among other factors, make it hard to recruit such people in the geographical areas that need them most. The necessary work of reconciliation has proven slow and politically contentious. Corruption is widespread and corrosive. These circumstances exist in the context of a continuing and pervasive insurgency…The objective of ensuring an Afghan state capable of ending internal conflict and providing basic services to its people will clearly not be met before the end of 2011.”

Such conclusions came as no surprise to Canada’s military leaders. Endemic corruption and lack of political capacity and leadership in their own area of responsibility, Kandahar, had impaired their own counter-insurgency efforts and had jeopardized the safety of their own troops. The Canadian public was tired of the stalemate in Kandahar; so were Canada’s most senior military officers, who knew where the real problems lay.

The problems did not rest with their men and women in theatre. From 2006, Canadian soldiers had proven themselves more than capable in their combat role. Their training was excellent and their conduct in battle extraordinary. But the condition and the quantity of their equipment was inconsistent; it ranged from excellent to inadequate. It was no secret that their battle group numbers were insufficient for an area the size of Kandahar.

Looking back at the period from 2006 to 2009, a senior Canadian officer concluded that troops “dealt with the worst military threats posed by the Taliban. We managed. We didn’t lose, but we didn’t win. Some would argue, and I would agree, that we sometimes made things worse.”

But the American surge had a profound and positive impact on the mission. By summer 2010 an additional 30,000 U.S. troops – more than 100 times the number of Canadians in theatre – were deployed in Afghanistan; many of these troops were spread across Kandahar province and in Kandahar city. The surge allowed Canada to concentrate its area of operations to just two districts: Dand, immediately south of the city, and Panjwaii, the perennial battlefield to the west.

CANADA’S LAST BATTLEGROUNDS

The two districts are an interesting study in contrasts. Now synonymous with the Taliban, Panjwaii is fertile and agricultural; most of its 30,000 inhabitants depend on farming for their livelihoods. The landscape is divided by walls demarcating villages, family compounds and fields, and by myriad irrigation ditches and dirt tracks. The tight grid-work pattern make perfect terrain for guerrilla warfare, especially in the verdant summer, as it offers plenty of ground cover to insurgents on foot and creates one obstacle after another to conventional land forces mounted in armoured vehicles.

Dand, on the other hand, is arid, open, and sparsely populated. Although the Taliban have launched attacks on troops there, it is not a major insurgent base and has presented fewer challenges to Canadian soldiers. Dand’s district governor – a position equivalent to the chairman of a regional municipality in Canada – is Hamdullah Nazik, an affable, educated man in his thirties whom coalition soldiers and senior diplomats trust. Compared to Panjwaii, Dand is an oasis of calm.

But by March 2009, “the district was about to fall,” recalls Brig.-Gen.Vance, who commanded troops in Kandahar that year. The Taliban had managed to attack Dand’s district centre, a walled government compound where Mr. Nazik worked and where limited public services were offered to locals. Most of the infrastructure was destroyed. The successful insurgent strike on the district centre signalled again that Canadian troops and their Afghan partners did not provide blanket protection.

To restore local confidence, Brig.-Gen. Vance redoubled Canadian efforts in the district. He conceived of an ambitious reconstruction and rehabilitation campaign that would initially see the shattered district centre restored and improved, with more government services offered there, and physical improvements made to a village called Deh-e-Bagh. The district centre and Deh-e-Bagh would be presented as models of progress, positive examples of what might be accomplished should Afghan elders in other settlements put their faith in coalition troops and work with them, rather than submit to Taliban threats.

Brig.-Gen. Vance hoped to expand this “model village” approach program across the district and then into Panjwaii. He enlisted the help of an American military professor and counterinsurgency expert named Thomas Johnson. This was an interesting choice; Prof. Johnson was already a fierce critic of the U.S. military’s approach to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. He notoriously compared the war against the Taliban to another counterinsurgency, one waged a generation earlier in Vietnam, and he dismissed a large British and American-led operation in the province of Helmand as “essentially a giant public affairs exercise, designed to shore up dwindling domestic support for the war by creating an illusion of progress.” He was no fan of the country’s president, Hamid Karzai. Prof. Johnson would characterize President Karzai’s August 2009 re-election as “rigged” and “a disgrace.”

To independent observers of the war in Afghanistan, this was a refreshingly honest and informed perspective. It was also completely at odds with the official ISAF view; one never heard, for example, a Canadian general in Kandahar disparage either the coalition’s efforts or the Afghan president, at least not in public.

But Brig.-Gen. Vance was obviously impressed with Prof. Johnson. He invited him to Task Force Kandahar headquarters at KAF, and together they designed the new Dand district strategy.

Roads were paved and solar-powered street lamps were installed in Deh-e-Bagh. The district centre was refurbished and a courthouse was built. Security rings went up around other district villages and population clusters, and infrastructure was rebuilt to improve economic development and governance.

But the Taliban did not throw down their arms and concede. In September 2009, insurgents attacked a Canadian convoy as it traveled near Dand’s district centre. One soldier was injured when his light armoured vehicle (LAV) was stuck. As it happened, Brig.-Gen. Vance was close by in another vehicle. He immediately called a meeting, or shura, with local elders. According to Canadian Press reporter Bill Graveland, who was also on hand, the general was furious.

“It disgusts me that my soldiers can be hurt,” Brig.-Gen. Vance told the elders. “If we keep blowing up on the roads I’m going to stop doing development. If we stop doing development in Dand, I believe Afghanistan and Kandahar is a project that cannot be saved.” Brig.-Gen. Vance said he expected the local population to cooperate with coalition and Afghan soldiers, and to report suspicious activities. Elders nodded their heads as if in agreement, but as always, it was impossible to know where their confidence lay.

Insurgent attacks continued in Dand. In late December 2009, four Canadian soldiers – Sergeant George Miok, Sergeant Kirk Taylor, Corporal Zachery McCormack, Private Garrett Chidley – and Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang were killed when the LAV in which they were traveling was hit by an IED. A reporter in Toronto tracked down Prof. Johnson and asked him to comment on the deadly incident. “I’m shocked that the bombing would have happened in Dand,” he said. Then he raised the obvious: Insurgents, he said, “might have had an explicit objective to discredit the Canadian model village project.”

Attempts were made on the district governor’s life; all of them failed but a dozen village leaders in Dand were reportedly assassinated. Yet security in the district had noticeably improved by summer 2010. Some Afghan acquaintances of mine, local men who had refused to travel into Dand the previous year, suddenly determined it was safe. For his part, Brig.-Gen. Vance was determined to show that his counterinsurgency formula was working. “They’re actually dealing with the finer points of political assembly in Dand right now,” he insisted, during an August 2010 interview with reporters embedded with his troops.

A few weeks later, he invited three of us on an excursion into the district centre. After a meeting there with American soldiers under his command, Brig.-Gen. Vance announced he was venturing outside the walled compound for a stroll. He removed his body armour; until then, I had never seen a Canadian soldier – let alone the most senior officer in Kandahar – do such a thing in the open. We followed suit. We walked outside to a freshly paved intersection, and we stood there, completely exposed. A crowd of villagers formed around us. Some local children challenged a pair of soldiers to a foot race. Off they all ran, arms flailing, hats flying, the children screeching with delight.

I’d first come to Kandahar in 2006; this was the first time that I had sensed any real hope.

Bigger changes were to come. In September last year, U.S. and Afghan forces launched major campaigns in Zhari and Panjwaii districts. These represented the final phase of a three-stage operation designed to secure the most populous parts of Kandahar province and to push the insurgency there to the brink. Dubbed Hamkari, the Pashto word for “cooperation,” the operation launched in June with the establishment of Afghan police road checkpoints around Kandahar city. These were intended to prevent insurgents from entering the city; in practice, they didn’t work. Then came an American-led clearing operation in Arghandab district north of the city. This battle was hard fought and longer than anticipated; the Taliban mounted a stiff challenge but were ultimately handed a defeat. U.S. and Afghan troops held the territory they had cleared, and attempted to win over local families who had suffered their own losses during the fighting.

A similar scenario unfolded in Zhari, where U.S. and Afghan troops fought the Taliban from mid-September to October. Some of the district was cleared, but not all; parts of Zhari remains under Taliban control. Phase Three in Panjwaii then kicked off, with U.S. special forces, U.S. infantry, and Afghan National Army elements entering the Horn and taking the key villages of Zangabad and Mushan. The village of Talukan, in the middle of the Horn, was claimed last. Meanwhile, Canadian troops protected their hard-won positions in eastern Panjwaii, in villages such as Nakhonay, Salavat and Chalghowr.

Demoralized by their defeat in the Arghandab, battered in Zhari, and with much of their local leadership killed off by U.S. special forces, the Taliban barely mustered a fight in the Horn. Their sanctuary was taken with relative ease. But more work was required there, and more troops. The Canadians knew the terrain. They were going back, this time with renewed purpose.

THE LONG ROAD

Former operations planner Eric Landry returned to Kandahar in late November, this time in command of a 60-person tank squadron, an element of 1er Bataillon, Royal 22ieme Regiment. Maj. Landry’s legendary “Vandoos” had the honour and burden of leading Canada’s last battle group in Kandahar. They were motivated by opportunity: Finish the long and contentious combat mission on a high note.

Conditions looked their best since 2006. Maj. Landry figured he’d barely be tested. “I thought I was going to come and sit here and once or twice a month do a little operation, attach a group of tanks to the infantry, and not really be in charge of anything,” he recalled later. That’s not how things went.

The Taliban had melted away, but they hadn’t left. Supply routes in the Horn remained exposed and under IED threat. American soldiers still holed up in Zangabad, Talukan and Mushan “had no road access, no ground lines of communication, and had to be resupplied by air,” says Maj. Landry’s battle group commander, Lt.-Col. Michel-Henri St-Louis. “They were maintaining their presence in the Horn from a pretty tenuous position. They were waiting for us to arrive.”

ISAF headquarters in Kandahar worked on a solution. On November 28, Lt.-Col. St-Louis was handed his mandate: Build a wide road, from a point north of FOB Sperwan Ghar and running westward, through Mushan and beyond, into the very tip of the Horn, where the Taliban still moved freely. Build across farmers’ fields. Knock down their grape and poppy field walls, and, if you must, knock down their houses. Arrange for their compensation. Pave the road, all 14 kilometres. Create connecting routes to coalition and ANSF positions at Zangabad and Talukan. Get started now, and have it all finished before the summer fighting season.

Lt.-Col. St-Louis delegated this “daunting task” to his young tank squadron leader, Maj. Landry. “It was a big deal for us,” the major recalled. “We were going to push into the Horn. It was the biggest challenge of our lives. So I was ecstatic. And I was nervous. I knew it was going to be complicated, and I wasn’t trained to do it.”

Maj. Landry had never overseen construction of a road before, but he had helped plan an earlier road project in Panjwaii. It was meant to tie the largest village in the district, Baazar-e-Panjwaii, to FOB Sperwan Ghar, a few kilometres to the west. An offshoot of Operation Baaz Tsuka, the project was started in early 2008 and abandoned that summer. “The assumption was that we would employ 400 local people and take away their temptation to join the insurgency, by handing them picks and shovels,” Maj. Landry recalls. “The idea was good but it went way too slow. We paved 1.5 kilometres in four months. We dedicated too many resources to it. I think it was just too time consuming.”

The new road would have to be better and safer. Maj. Landry and his team members went straight to work. He had to get the local population onside. “We first had a big meeting at the [Panjwaii] district centre, where the people gave me all their ideas for the road and what it should look like,” recalled Maj. Landry. The farmers wanted the road to follow Route Foster, which bends and twists and runs through or close to their main villages. But this wasn’t at all what ISAF had in mind. Compromises had to be reached, and negotiations took time.

Meanwhile, American troops were leaving Zangabad and replacements were needed there. Lt.-Col. St-Louis deployed 150 of his Vandoos – A-Company – to the village, where conditions were typically austere. The Americans had been encamped in an old school compound, which the Taliban had used as a command centre and as the seat of their shadow government and court. “That’s where we set up,” says Lt.-Col. St-Louis. “For the longest portion of our tour, we occupied the insurgent’s symbol of power in the Horn. The guys were bedding down in the courtyard of the school where five months prior, Afghan villagers who co-operated with ISAF were hanged. And they would be left there, as deterrents for other Afghans not to co-operate with the ANSF and the coalition.”

Captain Gabriel Benoit-Martin and a 40-member platoon he commanded were the first Canadians to arrive. “It was in a sad state,” he says. “The Americans had left and we found a few [fresh] booby traps, some IEDs.” But the local “pattern of life” in and around Zangabad, was, “surprisingly good,” Capt. Benoit-Martin recalls. “We thought it would be hell on Earth, but the locals were very happy to see us.”

The roadwork commenced in December. Maj. Landry’s team was supplemented by Americans, a crew of Puerto Rican combat engineers, plus Afghan contractors hired to do the road paving. They built 200 metres of road at a time. Armoured vehicles first cleared a path, and the route was shaped, graded, and gravelled. The paving came last.

The new road — called Route Hyena — was nearing completion when I visited the site two months ago. The men had endured freezing winter temperatures, spring flooding, blazing heat. Spiders and snakes. But these were minor hardships.

Everyone on the road was exposed to insurgent attack and to IED strike. The Vandoos suffered an early casualty. On December 18, Corporal Steve Martin was conducting a clearance operation next to the road, at a point between Zangabad and Talukan. He walked around a walled compound. There was an explosion. Cpl. Martin was killed by an IED. He was 24.

In March, the village leader — or malik — was killed in a suicide attack launched from the bazaar. Two civilian truck drivers were also killed. Two Canadian soldiers and five Americans were wounded.

When I visited, Afghan civilians paced warily on the roadside. Some were armed with machine guns and grenade launchers. They were private civilian contractors, hired to protect the Afghan road paving crews. Gravel trucks lined the route; many of their windshields were shot through with bullet holes.

“We’ve found minefields everywhere,” Capt. Adam Siokalo, the tank squadron’s second-in-command, told me, as we stood on a segment of freshly paved road, metres from where Cpl. Martin had died. “We still have [enemy] contact almost every day. Most of it is harassment fire from grape fields, places without road access. It’s hard to get at them when they are shooting at us from the fields. But we’ve also found lots of their caches, weapons, mortars, guns, and ammunition.”

We continued heading west, towards the end of the road. Into Mushan, which I had last visited in 2008. We were to stop there, but Capt. Siokalo received a report warning of a possible suicide attack. We pushed ahead another kilometre, and met up with a small Canadian reconnaissance squadron. A small group of soldiers were camped at the side of the new road, watching for enemy activity. This was a lonely, exposed spot. We didn’t linger.

We moved instead to the end of Route Hyena, where all progress stopped. On one side sat an empty white schoolhouse, its walls etched with drawings: Helicopters, scenes of war. Next to the empty school was a guard tower, manned by a handful of Afghan National Civilian Order Police, an elite unit of officers. They looked west, towards the narrow tip of the Horn and the furthest reaches of Panjwaii district. In that direction, they said, are more Taliban. Beside the guard tower sat a 60-tonne Canadian Leopard 2A6M tank from Maj. Landry’s armoured squadron. As long as it remained there, its cannon pointing west, we were safe.

I thought of the men and women who have died along this route, behind it, and beyond it. I thought of the soldiers who have survived their tours, and of those who have returned to Kandahar, once, twice, three times. Returning soldiers such as Corey McCue, who has seen the very worst of the mission, and, at the end, its best. “I’m not saying I’m really tough or anything, but what guys were doing in ’08 compared to what guys are doing now, this is a breeze,” Cpl. McCue told me back at KAF. “And going all the way down to the Horn like that? That road is pretty much saying to the Taliban, ‘In your face.'”

But he’s leaving. The Canadians are leaving. American troops and equipment are now filling in the space, but they won’t stay forever. When will Afghans be able to protect themselves and defend their fragile, teetering country? The end of the road is just 40 kilometres from Kandahar city, the Taliban’s holy grail.

bhutchinson@nationalpost.com

All illustrations by Richard Johnson, National Post.
Contact the illustrator: rjohnson@nationalpost.comwww.newsillustrator.com

For better or worse, Canada’s legacy in Kandahar is left in the hands of men such as Mussa Kalim. He’s the 22-year-old malik -Pashto for appointed leader -of Salavat, a village of about 1,500 battered souls in Panjwaii district, west of Kandahar city.

Like others in the area, his village is poor and primitive, a place where raw sewage trickles down streets, where children run barefoot. In rural Panjwaii, women are kept with livestock behind walls of mud and straw.

Salavat might seem too small or insignificant -and Mr. Kalim, pictured below, too young -to have warranted more than passing notice from Canadian soldiers on their deployment to Kandahar in 2006.

And yet this village and others around it became a preoccupation, first as battle scenes and, more recently, as centres of reconstruction. They would epitomize Canada’s campaign in Kandahar province.

The Canadian mission, which ends formally in Kandahar on Tuesday, was never limited to combat; it always included elements of development and nation-building. Mending the province’s villages and its shambolic capital, Kandahar city, and trying to nurture governance and rules of law required more than military resources and diplomacy, more than machinery, bricks and talk. Experts from cities across Canada arrived in droves. Civil servants, relief workers, private-sector employees. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, police officers.

Their efforts were ambitious, technical and expensive. They ranged from training teachers and building dozens of schools in conflict zones to mending broken infrastructure, such as Kandahar’s massive, neglected irrigation system, integral to the province’s agrarian economy. They included attempts to pull from the Middle Ages its policing and judiciary, and rehabilitating its largest prison, the notoriously assailable Sarposa.

Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and some were no doubt squandered.

Progress was slow, and delayed by fear, interrupted by bursts of violence. The Taliban were not defeated; they never left. They continued to threaten and to kill Afghans who dared assist Canadians in their endeavours. Meanwhile, some civilians looked for opportunities to help only themselves.

At times, Canada’s sacrifices were crassly exploited. Reconstruction projects and attempts to fashion some kind of peace depended on sincerity and commitment, two components in short supply. Local partnerships and alliances were inscrutable. To many Afghans, everything seemed negotiable, including trust.

From this complex environment emerged Mr. Kalim. He became an unlikely leader and Canadian ally. He’s not a powerful and charismatic figure like Panjwaii’s barrel-chested district leader, a former mujahedeen warrior named Hajji Fazluddin Agha. Nor is he feared, like the local drug lords and some land owners.

With little, if any, property to his name and only four years of primary school education, Mr. Kalim has more in common with the marginalized, illiterate tenant farmers who eke out their meagre livings in and around Salavat. But he has some influence, or so the Canadians hoped.

His father was the malik until he was murdered three years ago. He had taken a trip into Kandahar city to speak with government officials. A dozen Talibs stopped his car on his return journey. They demanded to know every passenger’s name. They had found whom they were looking for. They dragged the malik from the vehicle and shot him in the head.

Young Mr. Kalim and the rest of his family moved to safer ground in the city. The Taliban, meanwhile, ran roughshod over Salavat. Indeed, some villagers welcomed them back; the local mullah is said to be friendly with Mullah Omar, the one-eyed cleric who was head of state, Commander of the Faithful of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, until his Taliban government fell in late 2001. He fled Kandahar and is believed to be living in Pakistan.

According to an AfghanCanadian hired to help Task Force Kandahar understand local affairs, Salavat “has close ties to the Taliban. It’s a very conservative town. It’s name means ‘prayer.’ ”

The village and its surroundings crawled with insurgents. Roads and fields were seeded with improvised explosive devices (IEDs). But Canadian soldiers settled near Salavat in 2009 and used an old school and its small compound as an outpost before building a larger and more fortified forward operating base next door.

Holding Salavat was difficult and no reconstruction efforts were possible. But last year brought noticeable improvements in security, especially after the third and final phase of Operation Hamkari, a major coalition clear-and-hold operation in Panjwaii and Zhari district to the north. U.S. and Afghan troops claimed territory that had been controlled by the Taliban in the western half of Panjwaii, and Canadian troops consolidated and expanded their influence in the other half, in and around villages such as Salavat, Chalghowr and Nakhonay.

By December 2010, Canadian soldiers were rebuilding the damaged Salavat school compound, with some help from locals. Work continued in the new year; the small concrete classrooms were painted, inside and out, and basic playground equipment and solarpowered lights were installed in the yard. Finishing touches were completed by March. The Canadians had done their part, as they had many times before.

And Mr. Kalim took a bold step. He formally pledged his support for the Canadian effort and to the Afghan government.

With approval from Mr. Agha, the new Panjwaii district governor, pictured below, Mr. Kalim replaced his father’s successor and became malik. It was now up to him to represent Salavat at local government level and ensure its residents were participating in small development projects undertaken there, including clearing irrigation canals.

Villagers were paid for their work; Canadian civil-military co-operation (CIMIC) soldiers stationed at the forward operating base supplied the cash, and Mr. Kalim was responsible for handing it to the people.

He was also asked to help convince parents that sending their children to the refurbished school would be a blessing. Of course, the Taliban had a different message. Send your children to school, they threatened, and face the consequences: injury or death.

The school sat empty. Salavat was at a tipping point.

Mr. Kalim was a visible presence in the village, but only during daylight. In the evenings, he returned to his family in Kandahar city. He felt they were safer there.

They probably were. Kandahar’s capital is a sprawling urban centre, with a population of about 750,000. It’s easier to live there without being noticed than in a small, rural village. Those with means can build a fortress and hire armed guards to protect it.

But it’s still one of the world’s most lawless, dangerous cities. Suicide bombings and IED attacks erupt almost daily. The Taliban target, ambush and kill government workers in the streets, inside government buildings, even inside mosques. More than 50 provincial and municipal government workers, politicians and security officers have been assassinated in the city in the past three years alone. Ordinary Kandaharis face enormous risks, too, just leaving their homes and trying to go about their ordinary business.

Insurgents run amok, and so do common criminals. Kidnappings are all too common. Three years ago, with security in the city not yet at its worst, I met a nine-year-old boy named Abdul Walid Zalal. He was grabbed from a downtown street as he walked home from school, and shoved into a car.

He described how his abductors drove him to a location far from the city, and stuffed him into a cage in a basement. There were other boys there, in cages, Abdul recalled. He also recalled peeking out from the underground bunker and glimpsing Afghan National Police (ANP) vehicles parked in the kidnappers’ compound.

The abductors contacted his father, a local glassware wholesaler. He was told to fork over US$200,000 or Abdul would be cut into pieces and shot.

“I approached the police when my boy was taken,” the father told me. “And the chief himself told me to pay off the kidnappers. A couple of times I was even sitting with the police chief when the kidnappers called to tell me they were going to cut off the boy’s leg or ears. The police chief just sat there.”

A smaller ransom was paid and Abdul was released.

A few weeks later, in February 2008, three ANP officers went on trial, accused of kidnapping and repeatedly sodomizing another local man and his 12-year-old son.

Their case was heard by a local judge and proceeded at lightning speed; the entire process, including testimonies, deliberations and sentencing, was conducted in an hour. None of perpetrators was represented by counsel.

It was a month of horrible violence. Hundreds of Kandaharis gathered just outside the city for some rare entertainment. Dog fights are considered a legitimate sport in Kandahar. Five Afghan National Auxiliary Police officers were in attendance, along with their commander, Abdul Hakim Jan. In fact, Mr. Jan had entered a dog in the competition.

A suicide bomber attacked. He blew himself up. Mr. Jan appeared to have been the target; he was killed. So were more than 100 others. Dozens more were wounded. The next day, at least 35 Kandaharis were killed near Spin Boldak, the result of another suicide attack. And a car bomb exploded in Kandahar city the day after that, killing one civilian and injuring three others.

Three days; so many innocent lives taken. All the incidents took place inside the Canadian military’s zone of security, combat operations and development. Realistically, none could have been prevented or avoided. But Kandaharis were understandably furious. “For God’s sake, stop this series of bloodshed,” said one man, Akbar Jan. “What can we do? Honestly, we can’t even go out and go shopping.”

Some even blamed foreign troops. I called my friend Aman Kamran, whom I described in Part One of this series last week. Mr. Kamran was always frank with me, but I wasn’t expecting such anger directed at Canadian and other coalition troops. “You took away one evil [the Taliban] and imposed another evil, even worse,” he said. “Why should I thank you for that?”

That seemed harsh, but Kandahar in 2008 was in a terrible state.

Canadian soldiers were losing ground against the Taliban outside the city, in the districts. The mission’s other counterinsurgency component, the crucial development and reconstruction approach, was going nowhere.

The Canadian government had identified its priorities in Kandahar -maintain a more secure environment, and establish law and order; provide jobs, education and essential services, such as water; provide humanitarian assistance to people in need; enhance the management and security of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border -but it could not point to any clear signs progress.

Reporters embedded at Kandahar Airfield were encouraged by Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs & International Trade (DFAIT) to interpret and describe Canada’s non-combat operations in Kandahar, but they were rarely afforded access to government personnel and civilian-focused projects on the ground.

Like the Canadian Forces, DFAIT assigned people in Kandahar to handle media requests; unlike the Canadian Forces, DFAIT denied or ignored most of the requests it received. This was a constant source of frustration for embedded journalists and for military personnel as well. The skeptics among us wondered if any civilian-led reconstruction and development efforts were being undertaken at all.

About 350 civilians and police officers were assigned to the Canadian-led Task Force in Kandahar at any given time. Most lived inside the heavily fortified Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) headquarters in Kandahar city. The PRT contingent included DFAIT officials, diplomats, Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) staffers, plus Royal Canadian Mounted Police, provincial police and municipal police officers.

Few of the bureaucrats ever ventured outside; most remained inside the PRT compound for months at a time and had little direct contact with Kandaharis. Early in 2008, a high-ranking CIDA official attended an elders’ meeting in Panjwaii district, and shocked everyone in attendance by confessing it was his first trip “outside the wire.”

Time and again, Canadian soldiers found themselves involved in development and rehabilitation projects, which they thought were to have been led by CIDA. In some cases, they said, they never laid eyes on a CIDA official.

Nevertheless, Ottawa announced three more large funding initiatives in 2008: $50-million to rehabilitate the Dahla dam and Arghandab irrigation system; a polio-vaccination program for children across Afghanistan; and “more than $90-million” for education initiatives, including $12-million to rehabilitate and build 50 schools in Kandahar. Once under way, these “signature projects” did seem focused and reasonably well-managed. According to DFAIT, all objectives were being met and all three projects are now nearing completion.

The department has to be taken at its word because its claims cannot be independently verified. (DFAIT said this week that 41 schools have been rehabilitated or constructed in Kandahar province to date; of those, 40 are “operational.” The figures do not include the restoration of the Salavat school. That project, and 10 more school restoration and construction projects in the district, made up a separate $685,000 initiative led by CIMIC teams.)

Besides DFAIT and CIDA employees, the PRT headquarters in Kandahar city housed a small team from Correctional Service Canada; its job was to help train local prison workers and improve the archaic Sarposa prison, located on the western boundary of Kandahar city.

The corrections team was dealt blow after blow, which may explain why members rarely gave interviews. In May 2008, Taliban fighters detained inside Sarposa launched a hunger strike to protest well-publicized allegations of torture and abuse by their Afghan jailers. Some of the detainees sewed their mouths shut in protest. A month later, a truck bomb exploded outside the prison and destroyed its main gate. A swarm of insurgents rushed inside and opened small-arms fire on prison workers. About 1,100 inmates, including 400 Taliban, escaped.

Steps were reportedly taken to make Sarposa more secure and the training of prison workers inside the PRT compound was intensified.

In August 2010, local reporters were invited to witness a ceremony to honour new graduates of the Canadian training program. The ceremony was cancelled after a minivan filled with trainees hit an IED as it was leaving the PRT. One was killed and 11 were wounded.

Earlier that day, the appointed governor of Kandahar province, an Afghan-Canadian named Tooryalai Wesa, chaired a security conference in his downtown palace and complained to his key security directors lawlessness and violence in the city were “intolerable … I need you people to come with a plan.”

Mr. Wesa himself has been the target of Taliban attacks. In January, his deputy was killed while on his way to work. A sui-cide bomber on a motorcycle slammed into his vehicle.

The targeted killings continued. The Taliban mounted more spectacular assaults. Three months ago, they struck again at Sarposa, tunnelling into a high security wing and freeing about 475 prisoners, most of them insurgents. The prison break was very wellcoordinated, and signalled yet again that coalition and Afghan government efforts to secure the province were sometimes illusory. Kandaharis stopped to think twice: Had the Taliban received any help? Rumours swirled the escape was an “inside job.” The prison head and nine other workers were arrested and questioned, but no charges were laid.

News of the second Sarposa prison break reached Salavat within hours. Canadian soldiers stationed in the neighbouring forward operating base were on alert; everyone expected the freed insurgents to run from Kandahar city and into the districts.

The Taliban were by no means a spent force. They had been handed defeats in the fall during the coalition-led Operation Hamkari, and earlier this year, dozens more of their fighters had given up and joined a new Afghan “reconciliation” program that offered immunity from prosecution, plus free housing and government jobs. But they continued their campaigns of harassment and intimidation in Panjwaii, and in villages such as Salavat. Insurgents left “night letters” outside local homes. These warned residents not to accept aid and jobs from Canadian troops. “Conspirators” would be snatched from their houses and severely punished. The same went for anyone who allowed their children to attend the refurbished school.

“The insurgents have very strong intelligence,” Mr. Kalim told a Canadian sergeant during one of their regular meetings inside the forward operating base. “They know who is working for whom. Believe me, sir, I am scared to come here. Maybe they will come to get me. Everyone knows I am the malik of Salavat.”

The district governor wasn’t so easily frightened. Mr. Agha was appointed to his new position for a reason: He knew how to get things done.

The district had suffered for years under his predecessor, an illiterate and allegedly corrupt individual named Hajji Baran, whom some Canadians believed had harboured Taliban sympathies. When Mr. Baran was removed from office in December, Panjwaii’s future immediately seemed brighter.

Mr. Agha soon became acquainted with coalition soldiers in the district, men and women from the First Battalion, Royal 22nd Regiment, the last Canadian battle group to deploy in Kandahar. He also met a burly, gravel-voiced man with white hair and goatee. He wasn’t an active soldier, but he was always wearing Canadian fatigues.

In fact, Don Rector is a U.S. private security contractor and Vietnam veteran assigned to a U.S. Army human terrain team (HTT) that operates in Panjwaii. Broadly speaking, HTTs collect socio-cultural data and other local information that helps U.S. military leaders make informed decisions about tactics and operations in theatre.

Mr. Rector and his assistant, a U.S. social scientist named Rheanna Rutledge, were seconded to Task Force Kandahar; they were helping CIMIC soldiers in the effort to open schools across Panjwaii. They both wore Canadian uniforms because it made them feel safer. “Canadians are viewed as a friendly, nice people,” their commanding officer explained to me back at Kandahar Airfield.

Mr. Rector had a lofty goal. He wanted to see 1,000 new students in Panjwaii schools by the end of April. “And we started at zero,” he told me. Ms. Rutledge had a slightly different perspective. “The number of students enrolled is not so important, she said. “It’s what’s going on in two or three months. Are they still taking their lessons?”

District Governor Agha bought into the school program and laid down the law at a shura in early April. He instructed Salavat’s elders to ignore the Taliban threats. Send your children to school, he commanded.

“What kind of people don’t allow a school to open?” he asked, according to a Post-media News reporter invited to attend the meeting. If the elders didn’t comply, he said, he would “bring the army and police to your homes and drag your kids to school.” The elders acquiesced. An announcement was circulated through the village. Salavat’s school would open April 12.

One problem: The school had no teachers. No one in the village was remotely qualified to lead a classroom. Searching Panjwaii for candidates with teaching experience -even an education -and brave enough to risk the wrath of the Taliban was time wasted.

Afghans employed as interpreters for Canadian soldiers were press-ganged into service. They arrived at the school at the appointed hour, and waited. And waited. The children didn’t come. No one, it seemed, wanted to be the first.

The ice was broken the following day, when two dozen boys arrived for their lessons. Fifty boys showed up on day three, and more than 70 came to school the following morning. By the time I visited a week later, about 250 boys were crowded into a handful of classrooms. No girls. Salavat wasn’t quite ready for that.

The students were being taught by eight young men. They were, I discovered, highschool students Mr. Kalim had recruited in Kandahar city. “The malik called our high school and said he needed teachers,” one of the young men, Bilal Ahmad, told me.

“We checked out the secur-ity situation and we agreed to come. It’s supposed to be temporary until real teachers arrive. We’re supposed to finish our own studies in June.”

The recruits said they desperately needed the wages Mr. Kalim had promised them, about $42 a week each. The money for their salaries was coming from CIMIC soldiers, but only on a temporary basis. By May, the Afghan government was to start handling the payments through its Ministry of Education. But the Salavat teachers weren’t hopeful.

DFAIT sent a message to the CIMIC on the matter.

“The KC [Kandahar city] based Salavat teaches have been processed and registered and will start receiving their salary at the end of the first month of work,” the memo read. “Teachers with four-year college degrees will be paid $700/month to teach, whereas teachers with a two-year college degree with be paid according to [an Afghan government salary scale].”

This was baffling; since none of the Salavat teachers had finished high school, they could not meet the qualifications spelled out by DFAIT.

There were other issues. Mr. Kalim had promised to pick up his recruits every morning in Kandahar city, drive them to Salavat, and return them home in the afternoon.

But this arrangement had lasted only a few days; Mr. Kalim told the teachers they should hire a taxi. Which they did. The fare ate up a good chunk of their wages, but it appeared there was no compensation coming to them. The same DFAIT memo noted that their new salaries “should be enough to cover the transportation costs of the Salavat teachers’ daily commute from KC [Kandahar city] … the expectation is that they should cover their transportation costs out of their own salaries, no matter where they live and work.”

Was no one in Kandahar city aware of their situation? Was no one listening?

Salavat’s students, meanwhile, had their own challenges. They could not afford their own pens and notebooks. They asked their teachers to buy these items for them; of course, the teachers said they could not help. Meanwhile, security remained a grave concern. Attending school in Salavat took guts. Some of the children were harassed while walking to school.

“The Taliban approached them and threatened to cut off their noses,” Mr. Ahmad told me. “They are taking their school bags and burning their school books. One of the kids is really scared, but his father says it’s OK, he should still come to school.”

Mr. Kalim, for his part, made no apologies for breaking his promise to ferry his young charges to and from work. He offered no explanations, either.

“The teachers are using the money we gave you, to give to them, to pay for their taxi?” asked Sergeant Tony Swainson, a CIMIC team member.

“Yes,” Mr. Kalim admitted. Their discussion turned to other matters. Mr. Kalim proposed the Canadians pony up some cash to improve the school grounds. Some flowers and trees would be nice.

Sgt. Swainson said he would look into that. Mr. Kalim then asked for more. He asked for a swimming pool. Sgt. Swainson laughed.

What about cookies for the students? And a teapot for the teachers? And water? They have nothing to drink.

“We can provide food, but only on a sustainable basis,” replied Sgt. Swainson. “Pretty soon, the Afghan government will have to find a way to fund all of that.”

“How much longer will you be staying here,” asked Mr. Kalim.

“Not much longer,” the Canadian said. “We’re trying to help you and your government become more proficient. You’re going to be here a lot longer than us.” Mr. Rector didn’t hit his enrolment target of 1,000 new students by the end of April. But as Ms. Rutledge said, the numbers aren’t really the most important thing. It’s what happens after the schools open. Are the children safe? Do the teachers receive their pay? No one can answer these questions, yet.

According to Task Force Kandahar, “funding from [Afghanistan’s] Department of Education for the salaries of the teachers in Salavat is expected to be in place before the next school year starts [in September].”

By then, it’s expected all 11 schools under the CIMIC program will have opened in Panjwaii. Canada’s commitment to have built or refurbished 50 more schools across Kandahar is expected to be met by the end of this year. But it’s unlikely that anyone from DFAIT or the Canadian Forces will be around to see if the schools remain “operational.”

It would be something worth celebrating were they to remain open, but in the big picture, an infinitesimal achievement. Convincing the Afghan government of the need to assume all of its responsibilities -education in Salavat, good governance in Panjwaii and Kandahar, protecting and serving its citizens across Afghanistan -is proving an insurmountable task.

bhutchinson@nationalpost.com

All illustrations by Richard Johnson, National Post.
Contact the illustrator: rjohnson@nationalpost.comwww.newsillustrator.com

A father writes, and then we talk. His son left Edmonton on Wednesday, bound for Kandahar. He’s a sapper with 1 Combat Engineer Regiment. Members of his regiment have been going to Kandahar since 2006. Six have not made it home alive.

“My heart is in my throat,” the father says. He worries for his son, who is heading into danger, and he worries that others might forget: Canada’s war in Afghanistan is not yet over. The final “shooting” tour ended this week but there’s more work to be done, in Kandahar and elsewhere in Afghanistan. His son is going outside the wire, into volatile places such as Panjwaii district, where 1 CER will remove equipment from forward operating bases and other outposts. It will also patrol the villages, clear routes of improvised explosive devices and destroy unwanted ordnance, all things its predecessors did.

At Kandahar Airfield (KAF) meanwhile, weapons, communications devices and vehicles will be sorted, cleaned and packed. Aircraft will be prepared for their hopscotch journeys home. A memorial to Canada’s fallen soldiers will be carefully dismantled and sent in pieces to Ottawa.

One mission winds down. Another begins. Almost 1,000 Canadian soldiers are joining Operation Attention, officially — and vaguely — described as an effort to train and advise senior Afghan police officers and soldiers.

Most of the Canadians are already deploying to Kabul. Others will travel in the autumn to more unfamiliar places: Herat, a province that borders Iran, and Mazar-e-Sharif, a province in the north. They’ll face more challenges, more uncertainties and more threats. That operation is to last three years, and will require several rotations of soldiers.

Work has just begun, too, for young Canadian war veterans, thousands of them, some damaged, some struggling to cope. How many lives were changed forever, at home and in Afghanistan? What were the prices paid? Who benefitted, and who did not? An accounting has started. It will continue for a long, long time. Remember, says the sapper’s father, nothing is really over yet.

Fresh new faces appeared at KAF in late April. Men and women, young soldiers and older, bureaucratic types, most of them looking thrilled to be in theatre and part of the ground effort at last. Every tear-down team drilled as if it was heading outside to lay a beating on the Taliban. Soon enough, they all experienced their first rocket attack.

Meanwhile, an Operation Attention advance party landed briefly at the airfield before pressing on to Kabul. “Our mission is not totally defined yet,” confessed a public affairs officer assigned to the group. “We’ll be offering mentorship and guidance to the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces]. We’ll be advising Afghan police and army leaders. Other than that…” His voice trailed off.

A few more details emerged later, but there remains a startling lack of clarity around the looming operation. Canadians, meanwhile, seem either unaware or indifferent to it; there’s been no real debate and few questions put to the government that introduced the mission. The same can be said of the bombing campaign over Libya that Canadian Forces have joined. This is surprising, given how divisive the Kandahar combat mission was at home.

Whatever its scope and its purpose, Operation Attention won’t be a walk in the park. Kabul remains one of the most dangerous cities in the world, where the Taliban continue to launch spectacular assaults. Canadian soldiers have died there, as recently as May 2010, when a suicide bomber attacked a military convoy in Kabul, killing 18 people including Colonel Geoff Parker, the highest-ranking Canadian officer to die in Afghanistan.

Most Operation Attention soldiers will be housed and will work at Camp Phoenix, a large, U.S.-led military base adjacent to Kabul’s civilian airport. Camp Phoenix and the airport are common insurgent targets; the most recent attack occurred April 27 when an Afghan air force pilot allegedly recruited by the Taliban went on a shooting rampage at an airport facility. Eight U.S. military trainers and an American contractor were killed in that incident. Three weeks earlier, two suicide bombers blew themselves up at the camp gate.

There have been at least six deadly attacks on NATO-member trainers in Afghanistan this year, and several attacks launched against relief workers. In late March, seven foreigners were killed inside their United Nations office in Mazar-e-Sharif city, where approximately 90 Canadians attached to Operation Attention will be stationed. The Taliban denied responsibility for the Mazar-e-Sharif massacre, claiming it was “a pure act of responsible Muslims.”

Herat, the western Afghan province where another 15 Canadian soldiers will operate under Operation Attention, is considered a relatively peaceful place; even so, the Taliban launched an attack on its capital in late May. Four civilians were killed and 38 wounded when an insurgent bomber blew himself up outside an Italian-led provincial reconstruction team headquarters.

If most Canadians seem unaware of the threats their Operation Attention soldiers face, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has at least given notice. “Obviously in every part of Afghanistan, dangers exist,” Mr. Harper told reporters during his last trip to Kandahar, in May. “We’re not kidding Canadians about this…. It is a violent and dangerous country. There can be attacks that come to the base and from within the base. Obviously we expect these things to be of significantly lower risk than that we’ve experienced in the past.”

Operation Attention is scheduled to end in March 2014, when American and other foreign troops are to begin a complete drawback from Afghanistan. By then, it is hoped, the ANSF will have the manpower, training and equipment to protect Afghanistan from insurgent threats, and its other national institutions will be able to hold together the country and avoid a civil war. Right now, that seems a long shot.

By then, Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan will have cost far more than the $11.3-billion that Ottawa estimates it spent from 2001 to the present. The figure includes all Department of National Defence spending in Afghanistan ($8.8-billion), plus $1.64-billion for the Canadian International Development Agency, $466-million for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and $250-million for Veterans Affairs Canada.

Others have said the real costs are much higher. In a report released three years ago, Canada’s parliamentary budget office suggested the government was understating expenditures in Afghanistan. The report, titled Fiscal Impact of the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan, indicated the final tally, were troop strength to remain at 2,500 through 2011, would approach $18-billion.

The report’s authors also described a number of “challenges” that complicated the job of estimating mission costs. “There are no Afghanistan mission-specific appropriations by the Parliament for the various departments,” they noted. “This makes it impossible to isolate the total amounts of money appropriated by the Parliament, specifically for the Afghanistan mission…. There is a significant lack of fiscal transparency due to the current system of financial reporting…. Although costs are reported by the departments in a few cases, they are not justified with sufficient methodology or explanation, making their utility very subjective and of limited value.”

Veterans Affairs was used as an example. The authors had trouble finding relevant data to assist them in formulating a reliable estimate of the cost of caring for soldiers returning from Afghanistan. The costs accrue from the time the soldiers require care and into the future. “VAC does not report basic financial data specific to the Afghanistan mission, although Canada’s involvement in the Afghanistan mission is a major project and the resulting death, disability, medical and stress-related payments are fiscally material,” the authors noted.

The care afforded to our returning soldiers ­— our new, young veterans — is everyone’s concern. Anecdotal and documented evidence is not encouraging. There are confirmed reports of Afghan veterans wandering homeless in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside. VAC has launched ad hoc programs to assist them, offering the soldiers a drop-in space where they can pick up food vouchers, for example.

Last year, the department acknowledged that approximately 6,300 Canadian Forces members who have served in Afghanistan were receiving physical or psychiatric disability benefits. However, 4,100 of those veterans received benefits “not necessarily related to the Afghanistan mission,” the department told the Hill Times newspaper in Ottawa.

According to current estimates, almost 2,800 Canadian soldiers have been wounded in Afghanistan or have suffered non-battle injuries there since 2002; the figure includes those veterans diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. Most veterans of the Afghan mission who have qualified for disability payments receive a lump sum, rather than the sort of monthly pension payments allocated previously. Veterans and their advocates have complained that the new lump-sum payments are insufficient.

If there is some solace to be found, some encouragement, it’s how the public treats returning soldiers; witness the crowds gathered at ceremonies honouring their work in Afghanistan and at recent Remembrance Day events, and the outpouring of sympathy for fallen soldiers and their families. And on many minds, a question, the same question: Was it worth it?

It is constantly being asked. Yes, and no, and yes. What are lives worth, and freedom? What has been the real cost? There aren’t any answers, and the mission isn’t over, yet. More Canadians arrived in Afghanistan today. Was it worth it? There’s a better question, etched on a local cenotaph, and it’s meant for every one of us.

All illustrations by Richard Johnson, National Post.
Contact the illustrator: rjohnson@nationalpost.comwww.newsillustrator.com

]]>http://afghanistan.nationalpost.com/the-road-ahead/feed/0Part 4: Bringing the war homehttp://afghanistan.nationalpost.com/on-canada-day-2010-sergeant-bjarne-nielsen-lost-a-leg-in-afghanistan/
http://afghanistan.nationalpost.com/on-canada-day-2010-sergeant-bjarne-nielsen-lost-a-leg-in-afghanistan/#respondSat, 09 Jul 2011 08:00:56 +0000http://afghanistan.nationalpost.com/?p=2514By Richard JohnsonAt about the same time that Sergeant Bjarne Nielsen was being loaded onto a medical plane heading out of Afghanistan, his daughter, six-year-old Heather Nielsen and her mum, Maxine, were making fondant-sugar butterflies in Cambridge, Ont., for Canada Day. “Mommy, there are soldiers at the door,” Heather said, as she looked out of the window. The tow of them opened the door together, faced the news from a padre together, sat down and cried together. “He promised me he wouldn’t get hurt,” the little girl sobbed. “Daddy is very sorry,” Ms. Nielsen told her daughter. “He didn’t mean to. He needs us to be really strong soldiers now, and he needs our love to help him get better. Let’s forgive Daddy and kick his butt when we see him.” “I had a moment with my God and prayed for strength for what we were about to encounter,” she recalled later. “This very strong man needed me to be strong … and I wanted Bjarne to be proud of me.”

It is 1983. On a farm in southern Ontario a four-year-old boy sits on the gate of a horse paddock. His grandfather has recently taught him how to crack a whip. Crack. Crack. He lets the gate swing open and whips the air as the horses thunder by. Crack. Crack. He loves how the horses run and buck. One old mare takes umbrage at this game and kicks out at the boy’s head. Crack. The boy falls. Crack.

It was early in the morning of Canada Day 2010 when a patrol left Combat Outpost Ballpein, a base built from the burnt-out ruins of a schoolhouse near the village of Nakhonay in Panjwaii District, in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Nakhonay village is a small community of farmers, and Taliban. It has always tended to support the insurgency — remarkable considering it is only 20 kilometres to Kandahar Airfield (KAF.) Sergeant Bjarne Nielsen was leading the 11-man patrol, which included members of the 6th Platoon of Bravo Company of the 2nd Royal Canadian Regiment. He had been in Afghanistan for about seven weeks when his patrol left through the north gate, into the alleyways of Nakhonay. He took up position in the front of the patrol. After two months in theatre, Sgt. Nielsen knew the territory better than anyone and how dangerous it was. Having patrolled together many times, his platoon had also learned their lessons. “We trained ourselves and took pride in the fact that we would walk in one another’s footprints,” Sgt. Nielsen said. Before entering the grape fields, Sgt. Nielsen called a halt and had everyone perform their fives and twenties – a standard search pattern in which everyone studied the terrain around them and looked for anomalies; a wire, newly disturbed earth, or a marker like a piece of wool. When nothing was found, Sgt. Nielsen walked back along the patrol to collect the fire team who would take over the lead. He doesn’t remember how many steps he took – two, maybe three – but he remembers a blinding bang-flash of light. Someone had stepped on a pressure plate and activated an IED. The explosion was just behind and to the left of him, catching him mid stride. The initial wave of shrapnel ripped all the muscle and flesh from his left leg, tore out most of his left buttock, opened his left arm like a flower, and punctured a hole through his abdomen. The blast threw him high in the air. In the dust cloud and confusion immediately afterwards, the rest of the patrol could not locate him. They only knew that their sergeant had been struck because his radio was hanging in a tree. Sgt. Nielsen doesn’t remember flying through the air. He came to on an incline in a grape field with his left arm pinned behind him. “It wasn’t like pain. It was more like intense pressure, as if something gargantuan was squeezing the crap out of my left arm and my left leg. I knew at that time what had happened … and I accepted what had happened.” Incredibly, he remembered his drills and did a self-assessment. “All of my first aid supplies were on the left side of my body, so I knew right away they were gone. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to apply first aid.” As the dust settled, he called out to his soldiers on the other side of the wall. He remembers speaking clearly and slowly, in order not to panic. “Once you start panicking, that is when things go bad. That was something I had tried to train into my soldiers. You have got to stay cool. I think I did OK.” He remembers feeling some relief as some of those soldiers made their way over the wall to him. The medic, Cpl. Matthew Hill, Cpl. Chad Myron, and Cpl. Steve Cunningham arrived around the same time and started to work on his wounds. He slipped into unconsciousness; his soldiers slapped him to bring him round. “I told them to tell my daughter and my wife that I loved them.” They applied tourniquets to what was left of his leg, and after discovering his mangled left arm underneath him, bandaged what remained. They loaded him onto a stretcher and started an IV, and then moved him across the grape field toward a hole in the wall — up and over each two-metre mound, up and down, up and down, again and again. “I guess they were having a tough time carrying me across…and almost dropped me. Apparently I reached up, grabbed onto someone and told him to f—ing do his job and hold me up. Still doing my sergeant thing, even with half my body gone.” His second-in-command, Master Cpl. James Nuttall, had organized the medivac helicopter. It was one of the fastest extractions ever out of that area. The last thing Sgt. Nielsen remembered was being loaded onto the helicopter. Then blackness.

It is 1989. A ten-year-old boy jumps up and down on a concrete well cover, daring it to break. It eventually obliges and he falls four metres down the well in a flurry of dust and concrete.

Dr. Vivian McCallister was on his third tour as a soldier-surgeon in Afghanistan that summer. Having originally volunteered as a civilian in 2007, Dr. McCallister found the work so fulfilling that he joined the army so he could continue. They made him a major. He had just finished surgery at the hospital at KAF and was heading toward the Canada Day celebrations when he was paged to return. The field medics had done an incredible job with Sgt. Nielsen, but when the helicopter touched down he was very close to death. “He was bleeding heavily despite multiple tourniquets because the injuries extended up into the groin.” said Dr. McCallister. In the operating room, two orthopedic surgeons tried to stop the bleeding from the outside while Dr. McCallister and another surgeon worked on the inside. With the worst bleeding stopped, the next task was to clean out the wounds — they had about an hour before gangrene set in. “There was so much soil in the wounds you would think the Taliban were trying to send Bjarne home with all of Afghanistan in him,” said Dr. McCallister. Still, it looked like they might be able to save Sgt. Nielsen’s arm. Two of the surgeons fixed it in place with what looked like a big Meccano set. After 50 minutes in surgery, and 24 pints of blood, the sergeant was moved to the Intensive Care Unit. Twelve hours later, he was stable enough to move and was handed off to the Critical Care Transport Team and flown to Landstuhl, in Germany. “We all saluted his bravery and wished him well,” said Dr. McCallister.

It is 1992. A 13-year-old boy and his sister help their grandfather clear stumps from his property using a tractor and some chain. His sister is deaf. To the boy’s chagrin his sister gets to drive the tractor, while he has to carry the spare chain and walk behind. The boy’s sister – reveling in her newfound position of driver – floors the accelerator. The boy is dragged behind the tractor eating dirt and grass as he goes.

It took three days for Ms. Nielsen to get herself to Germany. “I thought about the women who don’t have their husbands coming home and it just made me more motivated to do something about the one who is alive,” she said. At the Landstuhl hospital, the strong, independent, adrenalin-fuelled army machine that she had fallen in love with was gone. Sgt. Nielsen was hidden under bandages and swelling, with tubes and wires covering every surface of his body. He was unconscious and in a state of continual organ failure while having daily transfusions because his red blood cell count was so low. As soon as his family was in his hospital room, his vital signs began to improve. His wife held him and cried. “He opened his eyes shortly after that and kept his eyes open. They took the breathing tube out that night,” she said. He was unable to talk but he could grunt and he could use his good arm for sign language. She spent the next week with her head by his head listening to him breathe whenever they were together. “I had my head right by his head. We kind of grunted to each other for the first little while, it was so amazing. We just cried and sighed, we didn’t have to talk. It was the most beautiful experience.”

It is 1995 and a group of boys run around a farmyard with lit Roman candles chasing one another and shooting them. They use straw bales as shields in their makeshift war.

After ten days in Germany, Sgt. Nielsen was flown back to Canada aboard the Prime Minister’s plane. He went into intensive care at a Toronto hospital and Ms. Nielsen went home to talk to Heather. “I just told her that Daddy hurt his leg really badly. I told her Daddy had to get a new leg because the doctor had to take it off because it was so badly broken,” she said. The next six months were numerous operations, setbacks and successes; then, Ms. Nielsen says, his natural strength of character and willpower started to come through. “People think it is because of the army, the way he is,” she said. “But it is not because of the army. The army allows him to be the way he is. That is who he is.” Sometimes, though, expectations proved difficult. “Whenever he had visitors … he would want to seem like he was doing so well … And he was doing well, but it would exhaust him. As soon as they left the room, there would be crying.” She added, “During the first seven months he would tell me every day, ‘Thank you so much.’ Eventually I said, ‘Look, just give me one big thank you and be done with it.’” Sgt. Nielsen needed 24-hour care and his wife was there through it all. “Maxine has been a vital part of my recovery,” he said. “She is pretty much a qualified nurse from everything that she has done. She has done bandage changes, helped with my IV, you name it, she has done it.” “I was the only one who could put him to sleep for a while,” said Ms. Nielsen. “Strangely, it was the best time of my life. “Now he knows I love him. He knows I love him no matter what.” In January, Sgt. Nielsen moved home to Cambridge and started physiotherapy. He had a resurgent infection in his arm due to dirt from the explosion. By March, he could hop up a flight of 12 stairs on his own and had even helped move furniture around their house. Determined to walk properly again — “When I walk, I want to have that natural gait” — he acted on a suggestion from his regimental sergeant-major and moved to a rehab centre north of Ottawa where the intensity of training and rehabilitation techniques better suited his drive to progress. The hardest part was leaving his wife and daughter behind — the couple now only sees each other at weekends. But on June 26, Maxine and Heather made a special trip to Ottawa to be with him for the fitting of his prosthetic limb. “It was different at first, because for so long I had to learn a new centre of balance,” said Sgt. Nielsen. “Once I had this leg, I could stand there and not hold onto something. And that is cool, that is the coolest thing ever.” Said Ms. Nielsen: “He made it look like someone who had been walking for a long time. It was so emotional, so incredible to see him standing up straight.” Three days later, Sgt. Nielsen got more good news — he was finally free of the infection caused by the Afghan soil. He was finally — literally — free of Afghanistan. He is now wondering what to do with the rest of his life. He has a promising future with the army, but isn’t sure what direction he wants to go. He knows he wants to do something that helps people, “something to do with helping families.” Dr. McCallister has this to say about Sgt. Nielsen’s future: “I have seen a saying written on a wall in Afghanistan, ‘When some give all, all should give some.’ We have been blessed to have been asked to look after Bjarne. He nearly gave all. Now he will get better and give some more.” National PostAll illustrations by Richard Johnson, National Post. Contact the illustrator: rjohnson@nationalpost.com www.newsillustrator.com

When Corporal Jordan Anderson prepared to go to war he made sure his wife knew what to expect should the worst happen.

“He told me that the case that he comes home in is called a transfer case and that there is dry ice in it. It’s not the casket. I would have to choose a casket for him,” said Amanda Anderson.

Cpl. Anderson told his wife details she didn’t want to hear, following her from room to room when she refused to listen.

“He told me, ‘If I am shot you might be able to see my body depending on where I was shot, but if it is an IED, don’t even expect to see me.’ ”

In this, Cpl. Anderson, who died when a massive IED killed him and six others, was wrong.

“Maybe two days before the funeral they said that I could see him. He looked almost like himself. He just had a small scratch on one cheek,” she said.

Cpl. Anderson even told his wife how the news would be broken to her.

“He told me that if two officers came to the door, he was wounded and that if three officers came to the door, he was dead.”

On July 4, 2007, at 7:02 a.m. Ms. Anderson answered her front door to find four soldiers standing there.

“I laughed at them and said, ‘There are too many of you.’ ”

Four years later, Ms. Anderson is still struggling to come to grips with what happened, still fighting emotions of pride, grief and anger, still looking for meaning in her husband’s death.

Ms. Anderson first met her future husband in the summer of 2001 when he was in Ottawa for two weeks as part of a rifle-shooting team.

“I noticed he was cute … and was wearing a yellow shirt,” she said.

Over drinks, he told her he was a soldier based in Edmonton, but his family home was farther north, in Inuvik, in the Northwest Territories.

For the next two weeks, they spent every spare moment together. Cpl Anderson eventually returned to Edmonton, but was back in Ottawa within weeks.

Ms. Anderson realized he was the “one” that week. They went out for dinner together, she said, and as the doors opened she looked back over her shoulder. “I love him — I don’t even know him,” she thought.

They drove her Toyota Camry back to Edmonton together and Ms. Anderson moved in with her aunt in the west end.

“I didn’t think it was quite right just to move in with him. I mean, really, I just came out for a vacation — just to see where things were going with him,” she said.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Cpl. Anderson was on a Mountain Ops course at Ghost River, near Canmore in the Rocky Mountains. The Edmonton Garrison went on lockdown, and his unit was put on 48-72 hours notice to move.

In February of 2002, he went to war.

“It’s OK if you go back home while I am gone, but I’d like it if you would come back for when I get home,” he told her.

Ms. Anderson wrote letters — a lot of letters. So did Cpl. Anderson.

“At that time they had two sat phones and two computers for a thousand guys. The phone calls were just awful … the delay. It was really frustrating. But the conversations were good,” she said.

On a bright day in July 2002, a crowd of thousands — five deep — stood under the ribbons on 97th street in Edmonton. The Princess Patricia’s were coming home, bloodied but having done their country proud.

Four Canadians had been killed in a friendly fire accident during the tour — Canada’s first deaths in the war.

“He was very pleased to see me. He said that was when he knew that I was the ‘one’ — when I stayed through the whole tour,” she said.

They were married in 2005. Cpl. Anderson wore his airborne dress uniform and Ms. Anderson had the colours of his maroon parachute beret built into the sash of her wedding gown.

On Ms. Anderson’s 30th birthday in 2005, Cpl. Anderson’s parachute training almost ended his career when a jump went wrong and he crushed two vertebrae.

The doctors gave him a 2% chance of ever jumping again and only a 10% chance of being able to stay in the infantry. But he refused to give up.

“He was able to heal because he was so dedicated,” Ms. Anderson said.

When he jumped again the surgeon met him at the landing zone to congratulate him.

“He loved it. That is what he wanted to do,” she said.

In February 2007, Cpl. Anderson went to war again. In April, he was back on home leave and they spent a few weeks in Florida.

“The last time I saw him was Miami airport. As we were separating, I was going up the escalator and I ducked down just to see him one more time. He looked at me and shrugged as if to say, ‘What’s your problem?’ ” she said, smiling.

“The last time he talked to me, the sat phone kept cutting out. He tried calling me for about 45 minutes or an hour and then we managed to connect for five minutes before it cut out again. And I am sure he was thinking, ‘Well, I’ll talk to her in a couple of days,’ and I am sure I was bitching about work.”

On July 4, 2007, while returning from a patrol just south of Nakhonay in Panjwaii district an RG-31 armoured vehicle carrying six Canadian soldiers and an Afghan interpreter hit an improvised explosive device (IED). Up to that point, the RG-31 had been considered one of the safest means of transport around the mine-infested road system.

This bomb, however, was so huge no amount of clever design engineering could have saved the occupants. The explosion sent the vehicle dozens of metres into the air. Everyone on board died instantly.

It was the worst single-event death toll in the war to that point. Cpl. Anderson was one of the six Canadians.

Deployment-delayed grief is a condition affecting spouses of soldiers. Left behind regularly for long periods by their military partners during deployment and training, they become used to the rhythm of being alone, then having their loved ones return.

When soldiers are killed, their spouses are in a form of denial. They are waiting for their partners to walk through the door even though they know, and accept, they are gone.

On good days, Ms. Anderson understands Cpl. Anderson is gone and he would want her to push ahead with her life. On bad days, she expects him to come walking in the door at any moment.

Much of the four years since his death has been a blur. She has dealt with all the expectations heaped on her by society, family and the military. She has dutifully attended every funeral, memorial and parade. All with Cpl. Anderson at her shoulder helping her, telling her what to expect next. She desperately does not want to let him down.

She still visits the dog park — a very special place. Before Cpl. Anderson died, they went there almost every day to walk their dog, Penny. On Saturday’s they sometimes went twice.

There is a bench there where she had her last real phone conversation with Cpl. Anderson when he had only six weeks left in his rotation.

“It was the last place I ever really spoke to him. I know it’s the last place he told me he loved me,” she said.

In the first years after his death, Ms. Anderson desperately wanted to know more about her husband, his work, his last tour, who he had been. She went parasailing because she wanted to feel what it was like under a canopy and did a jump from a mock tower — the structure trainee parachutists jump off during drills.

“I went paratrooper for the day. I got to shoot and jump off the mock tower. I did freeze at the edge but an instructor talked me through it. I remember being afraid but thinking, ‘I am not going to embarrass Jordan by walking down the stairs,’” she said.

“The guys from his unit were right there. So I just sat down and pushed off. I was terrified.”

In November 2009, she took the opportunity to go to Afghanistan.

“With the emptiness here, I had just lost all hope and I didn’t even care about anything. So I guess it took a long time to accept he wasn’t still over there. And then I went over there, and he’s not sitting at some picnic table.”

She stayed busy. She renovated the house in Edmonton and started a degree in graphic communications. None of it helped her recover.

Two years after his death, Ms. Anderson had a party for Cpl. Anderson’s friends and platoon-mates, and organized a “kit grab” of all his stuff.

“I figured he would want his guys to use it,” she said.

But she is still angry. In her journal, one section deals with people who told her not to be angry, but proud.

She wrote, “I learned that it is OK to be angry. This was a critical realization for me. I don’t have to be shy to express my anger because what has happened in my life is unfair, and things aren’t right in my world. I lost somebody of value. I no longer will trade being proud with anger.

“I will always be proud of my husband and his contributions, but it will also always be unfair that he was taken away from me.”

On July 4, 2011, it was four years since Cpl. Anderson’s death. Ms. Anderson feels she may finally be coming to terms with her loss.

“When I am here at home it just seems like he could walk through the door at any time. I went to Florida about three months ago and I realized how long he had been gone. It took a lot to go back to Florida because it was the last time we had been together.”

Ms. Anderson is now living in Ontario, near all the important places from her past, close to Cpl. Anderson in the military cemetery in Ottawa.

“He would not want me to be upset like this for so long. He would not want me living like that. I have no idea what the future is. But there has to be some good in it somewhere.”

On their wedding day on July 22, 2005, Ms. Anderson carried a bouquet of red roses. Her mom kept it for her.

“I think I am going to put it by his graveside. I think I am ready to do that,” she said.

National Post

All illustrations by Richard Johnson, National Post.
Contact the illustrator: rjohnson@nationalpost.comwww.newsillustrator.com

CFP PETAWAWA — Corporal Shaun Arntsen and his buddy Richard Green were playing cards near Kandahar in April 2002, when they were forced to abandon their game and head to the anti-armour range for night training. Both were members of Third Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. Before dawn broke the next day, Private Green and three other members of the Princess Pats — Sergeant Marc Leger, Cpl. Ainsworth Dyer and Pte. Nathan Lloyd Smith — were dead, killed in the Tarnak Farm friendly fire incident by an American F-16 fighter jet that dropped a laser-guided bomb on the Canadians by mistake.

Cpl. Arntsen found the body of one of his friends before heading back to base. “My last memory of Rick Green is putting our cards inside a box because we didn’t finish the game. That’s what I came back to — an unfinished cribbage game. I talked to Marc Leger six minutes before he died. It was a pretty tough day,” he said in an interview.

Shaun Arntsen escaped physical harm but he was injured nonetheless. The consequences for the then-married father of one daughter and two stepchildren have become all too familiar — post-traumatic stress disorder that resulted in the end of his military career, court-martial, marital break-up and drink and drug dependency.

With the end of the combat mission in Afghanistan, the Department of National Defence anticipates a gathering storm of PTSD and operational stress injury (OSI) victims, with some estimates suggesting one in four returning veterans may develop mental health problems. One parliamentary committee heard that, of 27,000 deployed CF personnel, 1,200 may be affected by post-traumatic stress disorder and a further 3,600 could face other mental health concerns.

Cpl. Arntsen said when he got back to base in Edmonton he found he couldn’t sleep, became obsessive about working out in the gym and developed agoraphobia. “My ex-wife went through hell. I was short-tempered and became abusive and physically violent. My daughter would look at me and wonder why going to the water park or the mall was such a big deal,” he said. A doctor diagnosed him with PTSD and he started drinking and using cocaine to dull the pain. “I don’t remember my last year in the military,” he said.

In 2004, he was court-martialled for being absent without leave and spent 17 days in pre-trial custody. On the day of the trial, the first question the judge asked was why Cpl. Arnsten was in his court, when a doctor had already said he shouldn’t even have been at work. He was eventually given a medical release, although he says the military fought to give him an administrative release, which he likened to “a dishonourable discharge.” The future looked bleak for the then-30-year-old, still haunted by his “old ghosts.”

Other veterans have found themselves unable to come to terms with their experiences and turned to suicide. In late June, Corporal James McMullin from Glace Bay, Cape Breton, was found dead at CFB Gagetown. His father, Darrell, told the Post’s Joe O’Connor that he was a different person when he came home from Afghanistan. “I spoke to three other soldiers at his memorial that had been caught in their garages with a rope over the rafters,” he said.

Jim Lowther, a veteran of tours in Bosnia and Afghanistan, experienced an operation stress injury five years after being in a combat situation. “It’s not just the combat, it’s the death and smell and the bodies and being shot at; it’s picking up your buddy’s leg, seeing dead kids and genocide; it’s wondering why they’re lining people up and shooting them. Eventually, it will come out,” he said.

The sheer number of Canadian troops who have been to Afghanistan helps explain the anticipated wave of PTSD and OSI cases. The Department of Veterans Affairs notes it has seen OSI cases rise to 13,000 men and women from 2,000 a decade ago. National Defence admits it has no idea how many cases it has treated in the 10 years and it has been criticized by the Canadian Forces Ombudsman for having no database by which to gauge the extent of the problem.

Stung by criticism in a 2009 report by the Ombudsman that the government was showing “lukewarm leadership and commitment at the national level” toward PTSD, both National Defence and Veterans Affairs have been gearing up with new clinics, peer support groups and personnel centres.

Veterans Affairs now has 10 OSI clinics, DND has five, in addition to a network of 24 Integrated Personnel Support Centres, one-stop shops for ill and injured servicemen and women. There is also a peer-support program — the Operational Stress Injury Social Support Program (OSISS) — that National Defence claims has helped 5,500 CF members and veterans since 2001.

Colonel Simon Hetherington, commander of 2 Canadian Mechanized Brigade, based at CFB Petawawa, 170 km west of Ottawa, said experience from previous Afghan tours suggests that the reaction to combat-induced stress is delayed. “We’ve got some work ahead of us. We’re not kidding ourselves, there are going to be some very difficult times ahead,” he said. A task-force of almost 2,000 troops has recently returned to base.

Major Janice Magar, a military psychiatrist at the recently opened Operational Trauma and Stress Support Centre at Petawawa, said demand has been steady, in part because soldiers are more open and willing to be seen. “I joined the military in the early 1990s and there is a huge difference in terms of the stigma attached to OSI. Everyone has been there [to Afghanistan] and knows what to expect. We now have better treatments and better facilities.”

She said around 6% of cases are clinically diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder, a very precisely defined anxiety disorder with specific symptoms like nightmares, flashbacks, irritability and avoidance of people and places who remind the patient of their experience.

One criticism is that, while DND boasts it has 350 mental health workers, only a very small proportion are psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. At Petawawa, of 14 staff, four are psychiatrists and three psychologists. “It’s a bit of a work in progress,” Maj. Magar admitted. But she defended a military system some critics have accused of being slow and poorly resourced.

“Sometimes we do encounter military members complaining about wait times or access to services. I just wish they could have the opportunity to see the civilian world for a little while, where you don’t get your medication or therapy paid for and you wait six months to a year to see a psychiatrist. It’s quite a different world out there,” she said.

For current members of the Canadian Forces, then, a safety net seems to have been put in place, even if some tragic cases slip through — Cpl. McMullin, for example, was seeing military and civilian counsellors. The system might not be there for all of the people, all of the time. Military budget cuts have already led to whispers that more and more CF members off work for extended periods with operational stress injuries will find themselves released.

But, as Maj. Magar pointed out, CF soldiers have access to better and more immediate services than others whose lives have also been turned upside down by Afghanistan and other Canadian military engagements — namely, family members, veterans and civilians who have served overseas.

Bases such as Petawawa do provide family members with some initial services — for example, couples counselling is covered — and they have access to support programs like military family resource centres. But spouses and children are not eligible for ongoing treatment — a situation that angers critics of the status quo like Senator Roméo Dallaire, who believes the Canadian Forces and Veterans Affairs should take family members under their wing.

Pierre Daigle, the Ombudsman for National Defence, said the Canadian Forces has made progress since his office’s critical 2009 report — for example, Chief of Defence Staff Walter Natynczyk himself launched Mental Health Awareness Week — but “there’s still a lot to be done,” particularly when it comes to caring for military families. “When I go around the country, I tell families they are an entity — you can’t separate the military spouse from the member,” he said.

Another group that appears vulnerable to slipping through the safety net are those who have developed problems after leaving the Forces, which often means they have no military pension.

Jim Lowther founded the Veterans Emergency Transition Services outreach group after running into a veteran he served with while volunteering at a soup kitchen in Halifax. “He said he was homeless. I couldn’t believe it. Then he picked out three other homeless veterans just sitting there,” he said.

The problem is not limited to Halifax, one outreach project in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside found 33 homeless veterans, most in their mid-30s.

Mr. Lowther is very critical of the OSI clinics and personnel support centres set up by National Defence and Veterans Affairs. “We’re downtown on patrol, working with the Salvation Army. What are they doing? Nothing. It’s just smoke and mirrors. It’s not working at all. They’re all military officers put in cozy positions and they don’t care. If they did, we wouldn’t need to be around.”

He said he has seen two recent cases where suicidal veterans were turned away by emergency room psychiatrists in Halifax. “The problem right across the country is going to get massive. When these guys call the suicide hotline, it sends them back to the ER. We have a lot of veterans on the streets and no place to take them.”

Veterans Affairs claims to have launched a number of pilot projects aimed at helping homeless vets but the office of new minister, Steven Blaney, did not make him available to discuss the issue.

Canadian Forces Ombudsman Pierre Daigle said there needs to be rationalization and reform of the various clinics and support centres designed to help service personnel. “They are all trying to help but I sense the coordination is not there,” he said.

A further group whose mental health needs are ignored by the existing system are the civilians who have served overseas with the Canadian International Development Agency and Foreign Affairs. Afghanistan is unique in recent engagements in the strong civilian contingent that served alongside the military as part of Canada’s 3D strategy — defence, diplomacy and development.

According to Ron Cochrane, executive director of the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers, there has been little recognition that CIDA and Foreign Affairs workers were even in a war, despite the death of diplomat Glyn Berry and the injuries suffered by Bushra Saeed, a diplomatic officer who lost a leg in the roadside bombing that killed journalist Michelle Lang and four soldiers. “She was well-treated in Afghanistan and in Germany by the military, but in Canada she was transferred from being treated like a female soldier on to Workers’ Compensation, as if she’d been in a traffic accident. It’s ridiculous and a double standard,” he said.

The provision for mental health services is even more lacking. When it comes to operational stress injuries, CIDA and Foreign Affairs seem roughly where the military was a decade ago. Civilian Afghan vets have to pay for their own PTSD therapy and there are concerns that it will take a suicide before the system is reformed.

Perhaps the only good news in this disturbing saga is that, as with other injuries, recovery is possible. Major Magar said that statistically, one third of patients make a full recovery and the vast majority show significant improvement with therapy. “This is not a career-ending diagnosis,” she said.

Shaun Arntsen is living proof that the road to recovery, while long and winding, is navigable. In 2006, he moved to Canmore, Alta., and began to work as a ski instructor. He still feels agoraphobic but said he’s rid himself of many of his ghosts, largely by talking about his experiences with other veterans. He currently works as a ski racing coach and professional driver. “When I first got out, I couldn’t work, I couldn’t get up in the morning. I felt like I’d been shunned, labelled a bad soldier and I fell into depression. But now I’m highly motivated and I’ve got my work ethic going. I’m back to who I was before I went overseas in ’02.”

Darrell McMullin starts talking and keeps talking for 35 minutes, relating his son’s story in a steady voice. Telling it because it is what he needs to do, because it is the only thing he knows how to do.

“My wife and I decided we weren’t going to be quiet about Jamie’s death,” says the grieving father. “I spoke to three other soldiers at his memorial that had been caught in their garages with a rope up over the rafters.

“And you know, you never hear about that, and if telling Jamie’s story helps one person — if it stops one soldier from going to their basement or wherever they go — and convinces them to pick up a phone and talk to someone instead, then it is going to mean that maybe our son didn’t die in vain.”

On June 17, Corporal Jamie McMullin hanged himself in the basement of his home in Oromocto, N.B. His wife, Megan, discovered the body.

Roadside bombs and Taliban bullets did not kill Cpl. McMullin. But, says his father, the war in Afghanistan still did.

“Jamie never came home,” Mr. McMullin says. “A different person came back from Afghanistan. The best way I can put it is he tried, he tried to get back, and tried to make everybody else happy when he came home but he couldn’t make himself happy.”

The Canadian combat mission in Afghanistan might be over, but for an untold number of military personnel suffering from post traumatic stress disorder the battles will be ongoing — lonely firefights involving emotional ghosts and mental goblins that can haunt and drag a wounded mind into a desperate corner where suicide often seems the only way out.

Twelve Canadian servicemen took their own lives in 2010. The military does not keep statistics on those who may have tried and failed, or others who might have thought about it, or of the heartbroken families, like the McMullins, who have been left to try to answer an unanswerable question: Why?

Jamie McMullin was happy by nature. It was how he greeted each day, and to see him engulfed by despair, as his friends and family did upon his return from the war, was to see a person they barely recognized.

Cpl. McMullin was a hockey player, a Wayne Gretzky fanatic, the kid that every other kid wanted to hang around with. He was a magnet, a young man with a huge heart and the lasting friendships to prove it.

“Jamie was always the life of the party,” his father says. “He did not have a shy bone in his body.”

His parents always knew he would join the army. Military service was the family enterprise. Darrell did 23 years as an army mechanic and today works as a civilian fix-it man at CFB Gagetown. Brenda, his wife, did a 23-year stretch as an administrator.

“He said he wanted to go roll around in the mud and jump out of helicopters,” Mr. McMullin says.

And so that is what he did, and he was good at it. A leader in civilian clothes, he became a corporal in the Royal Canadian Regiment, one of the military’s most respected outfits.

It was a proud day when he shipped out for deployment to Afghanistan in September 2008. It was what he had trained to do. But no training can prepare a soldier for the horrors of war.

He returned home the following March, changed. He spoke to his father, told him about everything he saw and did.

“I won’t discuss any of the things that he said but I knew right then that he was going to need to get counselling,” Mr. McMullin says.

“He lost a lot of friends. He had 12 poppies tattooed on his right arm, and each one was for a friend that he had lost over there.

“That tells you what he went through, what he lost when he was there, and just the mission itself — it is awfully tough for a soldier.”

Tough is hunting for insurgents in a conflict where potential enemies are all around and the infantry are walking through the middle of it. Walking dusty, heat-blasted trails where a single wrong step could be your last and where burying your buddies and then trying to bury the demons that come with their deaths was a part of the mission nobody really talked about.

Cpl. McMullin began seeing a civilian counsellor and a psychiatrist. He also worked with a military physician.

To his father, the trauma was obvious.

“He and I would be in the same room watching a hockey game and I’d leave the room and come back in again and his head would be down,” Mr. McMullin says. “As soon as he was alone he would start thinking about Afghanistan, and he’d get depressed.

“But as soon as someone was there, he would put on a smile again, try and make them happy and make them think that everything was okay.”

Toward the end of his life, he was on six different medications. Pills for depression, anxiety and anger, pills to make him sleep, pills to suppress his dreams because he was having nightmares and pills to settle his stomach down because he was taking so many pills.

Cpl. McMullin was never a huge drinker. He started drinking after his tour. Heavily. And when he would drink, he wouldn’t take his medication and then he would get even more depressed.

The old Jamie seldom got angry. Post-Afghanistan Jamie could barely contain his rages.

“Jamie never had an anger issue before he went over and he never drank like he did before he went over,” his father says. “The drinking and the anger were all a result of post-traumatic stress.”

Cpl. McMullin kept his military kit in his basement. He was organizing it the day he took his own life. His wife, Megan, had checked on him, twice, before falling asleep on the upstairs couch with the couple’s infant son, Jake.

“We can’t even imagine how much pain he must have been in, in his mind, to leave the boys and Megan behind,” his father says. “They were his whole world.”

Hunter, his 3½-year-old, has been asking: “Where is Daddy?”

Mr. McMullin plans on telling the boy his father’s story when he is old enough. Not just the ending, but the entire arc of it, with all the joys and goodness and richness.

Until then he will be busy writing, putting every memory down on paper and soliciting Jamie’s friends to do the same. He and Brenda have already collected almost 400 photographs.

“I am going to write Jamie’s life story,” Mr. McMullin says, his strong, Cape Breton accent cracking with emotion for the first time in our lengthy conversation. “I am going to write down everything I can remember about him. I want his boys to know that that last moment in his life doesn’t define Jamie.

“That one moment does not define who our son was.”

Cpl. Jamie McMullin was a magnet, a light that drew people in.

He was a soldier that went away and never came home.
PHOTO: Provided by family

]]>http://afghanistan.nationalpost.com/%e2%80%98a-different-person-came-back%e2%80%99/feed/0Dallaire warns of soldiers’ stresshttp://afghanistan.nationalpost.com/dallaire-warns-of-soldiers%e2%80%99-stress/
http://afghanistan.nationalpost.com/dallaire-warns-of-soldiers%e2%80%99-stress/#respondSat, 09 Jul 2011 02:15:23 +0000http://afghanistan.nationalpost.com/?p=2530Retired general Senator Roméo Dallaire has been a vocal supporter of raising awareness for veterans’ mental health since his own attempted suicide — a consequence of his experiences in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, where he was commander of the UN peacekeeping force. He spoke to John Ivison.

Q. Do you classify your own experience as an operational stress injury (OSI)?

A: Yes. When I got back, I’d spent a year in Africa, of which over three months was genocide and civil war. I was given less than three weeks leave and was told by my superiors the theory at the time was work hard and it will go away. There was absolutely nothing at the start and it only started to build up later. I completely crashed in 1998 and was released medically in 2000.

Q. Do you expect the incidence of OSI cases to rise as a result of the end of the mission in Afghanistan?

A. We now have a scenario where individuals operating on a high level of adrenalin are coming home. They have sustained a hell of a lot of stress and so have their families. They’ve put on the back-burner a lot of pent-up hurt. What happens when the war is over? They’ve got this well-established level of high intensity that, all of a sudden, has no aim to it. At least when World War Two was over, we coud say we won but in this case, they’re coming back and the war is not over and there is no cry of victory. What they have is a sense that the mission is not really finished. They’re not coming back to a victory parade; they’re coming back, having been relieved of combat duty by the Americans, which in itself is not the most buoyant of scenarios. Now they’re coming back to garrison to lick their wounds and, by the by, they’re coming back to budget cuts. I speak now purely from experience — when you’re finally out of that high intensity rhythm, you go down into a level of normalcy and it’s goddam near like pulling the plug on a lamp. You can see people dropping really fast from being a pillar of strength to suddenly having family problems. The individual’s hurt and pain that he’s been able to smother, well now he’s got time to think about it. I contend that when they say an army comes back to garrison to lick its wounds, that’s exactly what happens.

Q. Is the system geared to coping with OSI?

A. Up until 1997, we’d lost all capabilities of treating operational stress because we’d been at peace for so long. But by 1997, there were enough of us casualties, and I’d gone public, that the forces started to build up the capabilities to treat a whole new generation of veterans for which they had no skills. The realization emerged that this injury needed as much a sense of urgency for treatment as a physical injury, that OSI had just as devastating an impact as losing an arm or a leg, which was a revolution in the forces. Professional therapists got out of their offices and into the faces of soldiers to sell their wares and the forces started to look at personnel policies on how to handle these people without simply throwing them out because they weren’t performing well anymore.

Q. Is there still a stigma associated with OSI? Do soldiers try to hide their symptoms?

A. There is a cocoon in the Canadian Forces, a Darwinianism. You get high performing people who expect high levels of performance from others. They can be quite ruthless on people who can’t meet those levels, which they have to be. You can’t drag out people who can’t perform or you put the mission at risk. Culturally, we are a very visual bunch of people, we work off maps and technology. That makes it harder to comprehend a non-visual injury. But there has been a massive cultural shift. Calling it an ‘operational stress injury’ not a ‘mental health problem’ has been important — it broke the code for a lot of troops in giving them a sense they were not suffering from a dishonourable injury but a recognized injury that could have fatal consequences — i.e. suicide.

Q. Where is the system working and where is it falling down?

A. We’ve built up a pretty decent prevention program. We have created a transition stage on the way home, where guys can get used to clean sheets, decent meals and showers and where there is no noise or fear of war. This lets them come down to reasonable levels before they move back home. During this time, they can be evaluated by a formal program that has been recognized by the Americans as the most effective of any of the forces we know of. They’ve built up a pretty sophisticated methodology of identifying whether an individual is injured. Sometimes the troops find it annoying but it has proven itself quite worthy.

The deficiencies are on the treatment side, where we are still weak. It’s a question of whether the veteran is going to get the services he or she needs. I would contend that we’re still weak in bringing to the veterans the professional therapists, in particular psychologists, they need.

Another weakness is the failure to cover the families. Although the member is injured, so is the family. We have a hard time getting therapy for members of the forces but it’s even harder for the family member, who is caught in the fight between the feds and provinces over responsibility. It’s time the forces and Veterans Affairs Canada started to take care of the families — you hire the individual, you hire the family. If you put that individual under duress, there is no doubt that the family will suffer the consequences.

From my own personal example, my eldest son was 15….What happens when Dad comes home and he’s not the same guy? He thinks differently, he’s unpredictable, sensitive and stressed. How in hell do they adjust to that, especially if the spouse has not been able to be supportive or not sought support from the family support people? She’s probably in rough shape too, which exacerbates the scenario for children.

The cost of war on the human side is expensive — and much of it comes after the war.

Ryan Sheppard, 30, Captain2nd Regiment Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, Petawawa, Ont.
Almost nine years in the military deployed to Afghanistan twice

The most vivid memory was from an attack in June 2007. We had conducted some disruption operations in an area known to be Taliban friendly, with nothing very significant to report throughout the morning.

As nothing out of the ordinary had arisen, we began our exfiltration back toward our extraction point. I was travelling with the commanding officer, Major Dave Quick (now lieutenant colonel) and his tactical headquarters. There were about 20 persons.

As usual, we had walked several kilometres in from a staging area and it was scorching hot.

My mind had shifted from searching and destroying insurgent elements to getting back on the trucks to bring me back “home” to a shower and some fresh food. This is always a mistake.

As we took turns hopping over a large mud wall and heading down a path that skirted a seemingly abandoned town, machine-gun fire erupted from what seemed like all around me.

The thing about being engaged by a machine gun in very tight terrain, such as a village in Afghanistan, is that it is nearly impossible to discern immediately from where the fire is coming from.

I was now under contact in an alleyway, bordered to the north by a five-foot-high mud wall and to the south by a long structure, with no apparent cover. Intuition told me the bullets would be coming at me head-on, from down the length of the alleyway. At the rate of fire we were under, it would be only a matter of time before I was hit.

With a half-dozen soldiers to my front it was impossible for me to return suppressing fire, so without cover, instinctively I withdrew back down the alley, approximately 20 feet, to where I found a small alcove in the building wall to our south.

It was only about the size of a coat closet, but four of us crowded in. This forced me to the entrance of the alcove, partially exposed to enemy fire.

I remember thinking, “I am going to get hit. Please, don’t hit me in the head. Hit me in the limb and at least I will have a chance.”

But as the incoming fire continued we were able to better define the enemy position. The fire was originating from our north, on the other side of the mud wall. We were sheltered from direct fire, but our lead two soldiers were pinned down through a break in the wall.

We shook out, and adopted firing positions to suppress the enemy and allow our friendly troops to withdraw back to us and the cover of that wall.

Throughout the contact I was controlling two British Harriers fighter jets and they were tracking our situation well. Like you would see in a Vietnam war movie, I popped red smoke to indicate our position so the pilots would be able to identify friendly from enemy.

Under the authority of Maj. Quick, I brought the jets in for multiple attack runs on the Taliban machine gun positions and used volleys of 2.75-millimetre rockets to break contact.

We had pulled back slightly due to possible friendly fire as the rockets thundered into the treelines only 200 feet from our position and silenced any further insurgent contact for the day.

That day will stick with me forever because of the feeling I experienced when I resigned myself to accept I was about to be shot. I count myself lucky those worries never came to fruition.

It was the first time we had been in some real trouble. When I got back, I ran into Maj. Quick. We were both amazed we all came out alive.

“That was a close one,” I said. We grinned at each other. It was a little too close.
Did you serve in Afghanistan? Tell us the story of a single day during one of your tours — It can be any kind of story. Email us: soldierstories@nationalpost.com

Visit thelongroad.ca daily for more Soldiers’ Stories as our series continues.

All illustrations by Richard Johnson, National Post.
Contact the illustrator: rjohnson@nationalpost.comwww.newsillustrator.com

Tuesday April 26, 2011: The school at Chalghowr in Panjwaii district was to have opened by the time we arrived. Canadians had poured money into the building’s restoration, and the place was looking good. But local elders — the men who make decisions on behalf of their communities — were dithering.

There was no consensus on certain issues. Who would act as school caretaker? Who would supply the teachers, and could they be trusted? And what about security? Could anyone guarantee that insurgents would not attack they school? Instead of a grand opening, a shura — or meeting — was held at the school. It was a typical Panjwaii gathering. Lots of opinions and shouting. One group of men hived off from the meeting; eventually they just left, leaving Canadian soldiers to try and reach agreements with the others, as Afghan troops looked on.